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Singapore. It has been a challenging year for Sheldon Adelson, but the bullish 75-year-old US casino tycoon is confident he has enough aces up his sleeve to revive stalled projects in Asia.

The construction of new casinos in Macau and Singapore has been delayed after the global financial crisis hit both economies hard and Adelson’s company, Las Vegas Sands, ran into funding problems.

Once ranked the third-richest American by Forbes Magazine, Adelson saw the meltdown wipe out a substantial chunk of his fortune. He was forced to inject $1 billion of his own money into Las Vegas Sands.

But the self-made billionaire says the experience accumulated since he first went into business as a 12-year-old will help him put his gaming empire back on a winning streak, and industry analysts are giving him decent odds.

“I intend to rain on the critics’ parade,” Adelson said.

“If we are in the down portion now, we can look forward to going back up,” he said, describing himself as a “gut variety, plain vanilla entrepreneur.”

In recent years, Adelson has invested heavily in Asia, mainly in the Chinese territory of Macau, where a pre-crisis gaming boom saw the former Portuguese colony overtake Las Vegas in terms of overall revenue.

One industry analyst said Adelson may have taken huge risks in pursuing his Asian expansion but added they might pay off eventually.

“There is no question that the company has for quite some time taken a very strategically aggressive approach to the Asian market,” said Jonathan Galaviz, a partner with the Nevada-based consultancy Globalysis.

“Yet at the same time, one has to have respect for that because the Asian marketplace is going to be the growth market for the next 10 to 20 years.”

Adelson said he was aiming to restart the stalled projects in Macau later this year, once Las Vegas Sands completes a fund-raising exercise for $3.5 billion. A sale or public listing of the Macau assets are among the options being explored to raise the money, including $2 billion needed to complete the projects in the Chinese territory, he said.

“We are shooting for a restart of the Macau project before the end of this year,” said Adelson, the company’s chairman.

The delayed projects are part of the company’s ambitious $12 billion building plan in Macau.

Squeezed by the global credit crunch, Las Vegas Sands announced in November that work on some sites in Macau would be temporarily stopped until conditions in the world’s financial markets improved.

As in Macau, Adelson’s Singapore project has run into delays and cost overruns due to shortages of materials and labor, he said.

A $5.5 billion casino and convention complex, Marina Bay Sands, is now targeted to open in either January or February, instead of the end of this year as originally planned.

“So this is not a long delay. It’s a relatively short delay and the whole purpose of it is because it’s impossible to finish every square meter simultaneously,” he said.



Agence France-Presse