Hong Kong Horse Bets Exceed Las Vegas Casinos’: Chart of the Day

July 16, 2013 Leave a comment

Hong Kong Horse Bets Exceed Las Vegas Casinos’: Chart of the Day

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Bets on horse races in Hong Kong are poised to exceed wagers at Nevada’s casinos for a second straight year, with the city’s sole legal outlet for gambling seeking to lure punters from neighboring Macau.

The CHART OF THE DAY compares the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s annual betting totals with gaming revenue from Nevada’s casinos. Wagers of HK$93.8 billion ($12 billion) from 83 horse-race meetings in the fiscal year to June 30 were 19 percent more than Nevada’s combined take in the 11 months through May. Bets at the club, set up in 1884 when Hong Kong was under British rule, exceeded those in the U.S. gambling hub in fiscal 2012 for the first time in about a decade, according to data compiled from the club and Nevada regulators.The lower panel shows Jockey Club bets versus those in Macau, the only place in China where casinos are legal. Macau overtook Nevada’s Las Vegas Strip as the world’s top casino hub in 2006 after the government lifted a monopoly and granted licenses to companies including Las Vegas Sands Corp. (LVS), Wynn Resorts Ltd. (WYNN) and MGM Resorts International. (MGM)

The Jockey Club is seeking to raise sales further by keeping more Hong Kong residents from taking the one-hour ferry ride to Macau and through revenue-sharing agreements, Chief Executive Officer Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges said in an interview on July 12. The goal is to lure back about a third of the HK$26 billion Hong Kong residents bet in Macau the past year, he said.

Hitting that target may not be easy, according to Tim Craighead, senior gaming analyst at Bloomberg Industries. “I don’t really consider Macau as having drained the people away from horse racing,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like there has really been a growing base of Hong Kongers that have been opting for Macau compared to the Jockey Club (HKJCZ).”

Engelbrecht-Bresges said another goal is to attract as much as HK$10 billion of bets on Hong Kong races annually through so-called commingling arrangements with overseas partners. The club in August 2007 approved a plan to accept bets on its races from the U.S. through the Nevada Gaming Comission.

To contact the reporter on this story: Simon Lee in Hong Kong at slee936@bloomberg.net

Filed under Macro Trends

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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