Steve Wynn Pushing Ahead With Macau Expansion

Written on November 25, 2007 by a2zMacau

He helped Las Vegas shed its image as a sleazy gambling capital and make inroads as a family holiday destination, and his top-notch hotel restaurants have put Sin City on the culinary map.

Now tycoon Steve Wynn has his sights firmly trained on expanding his business in the former Portuguese colony of Macau as he looks to scale the next high point of what has been an already heady career.

The 65-year-old’s reputation was burnished further last week when the prestigious Michelin Guide announced its first Las Vegas edition, showering honors on Wynn’s restaurants across the city.

His 2.7 billion dollar resort on the Las Vegas Strip earned Michelin’s highest rating of five pavilions; three of the hotel’s restaurants earned stars in the respected gastronomic guide.

But while Wynn said he was excited by the success of his Las Vegas flagship, he hopes it will one day pale in comparison with the reputation of the resort he intends to build on Macau’s Cotai strip in the next decade.

The aim, Wynn told AFP, is to “create the most beautiful hotel ever built.”

“We’re not going to be the biggest, we’re not going to have the most amount of square footage, we’re not going to have the most amount of rooms or the biggest casino or any of that jazz,” Wynn said.

“We’re just going to have the nicest place anybody has ever walked into.”

That vague description of the unnamed, still-undesigned and unbudgeted property is a jab at Wynn?s chief rival in Las Vegas and Macau, Las Vegas Sands Inc., which this summer opened the mammoth 1.8 billion dollar Venetian Macau, reputed to be the world’s second-largest building and largest casino, on an area of reclaimed land on the Chinese Special Administrative Region.

It takes a certain amount of hubris to make such a vow, but Wynn?s track record as the visionary who remade Las Vegas twice has forced the world to take even his most over-the-top claims seriously.

“If he says he’s going to, I put the odds at at least 50-50 that he will,” said Anthony Curtis, publisher of the Las Vegas Advisor newsletter.

Wynn is accustomed to skeptics. In 1989, when he opened Vegas’ first mega-resort, the Mirage, most observers predicted its failure.

Instead, it was wildly successful and set off a themed-casino building boom in the 1990s that included the construction of the Treasure Island, the New York-New York and the Luxor.

Then, with the Bellagio in 1998, he bucked conventional wisdom by proving that Vegas tourists would pay for high-end rooms, shopping and dining.

In 2000, his company was bought out, so he bought a new piece of property and constructed the Wynn Las Vegas with a hitherto unseen level of opulence. That effort, too, had doubters, but now no less an authority than Michelin has recognized it.

Wynn Las Vegas is the only resort in the world with three star-rated restaurants and only one of eight to receive the five-pavilion award.

“For Vegas in general, this means the international snobbery regarding things like great culinary offerings here almost has to be swept completely out,” said Curtis.

The Michelin outcome was yet another case of one-upmanship for Wynn over his chief rival in Vegas and Macau, Sands’ chief executive Sheldon Adelson.

Wynn delights in noting that the Venetian Las Vegas had no star-rated restaurants. “Most of theirs are secondary restaurants, they’ve got a chef’s name on them but that?s not who’s cooking dinner,” Wynn said.

Still, Wynn doesn?t dwell for long on his triumphs, what with additions to Wynn Las Vegas and Wynn Macau under construction.

The Vegas addition, Encore, is a 2.1 billion dollar, 2,034-room tower due in 2009, while in Macau the Diamond Suites tower is due in 2010.

The appetite of the Chinese for all his offerings, not just his baccarat tables, has astounded Wynn.

The 2,815-square-foot Louis Vuitton shop in Wynn Macau did 54 million dollars in sales in the past year, making it the top-performing Louis Vuitton store and among the most profitable retail spaces in the world.

A Rolex store does 40,000 in business a day in a 700 square foot space.

“Chinese customers are not new to us, we?ve been dealing to them for 25 years in Las Vegas,” Wynn said.