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Stanley Ho, the legendary game mogul who died One year ago this month, he left behind a complex legacy.
Perhaps this is not surprising for a man who had fewer recognized partners (four) but more children (17) than Henry VIII. He also did some interesting paperwork at the board at his flagship Macau gaming company, SJM Holdings.
The SJM board is now headed by Daisy, the daughter of the late patriarch of her second marriage. One of his two co-chairs, Angela Leong, was Ho’s fourth wife. His third wife, Chan Un Chan, is also a director of SJM.
For most of a decade, as Ho’s health faded, SJM was the subject of what people close to the protagonists call “the war between the second and fourth families.”
This war was finally won by the second family in 2018, when Daisy succeeded her father as president of SJM. Less than a year later, the second family further consolidated control of Ho’s empire when Daisy’s older sister, Pansy, announced an alliance giving you effective control over the parent company of SJM.
The question now is whether Daisy can chart a new course for SJM, whose development was limited by Ho’s conservatism.
When the Macau betting market was liberalized in 2002, ending Ho’s 40-year monopoly, Sheldon Adelson’s new Las Vegas Sands-led operators built huge new resorts on the Cotai Strip, a vast land reclamation linking the two peripheral islands of Macau, Coloane and Taipa. .
Adelson, who died in Gener, and its top executives often disregarded Ho, who stubbornly clung to a collection of undifferentiated casinos on the densely populated Macau Peninsula.
An image from November 2006 showing Stanley Ho, in the center, on his 85th birthday with, from left, daughters Daisy, Pansy, Maisy, Josie and their son Lawrence in Hong Kong © Ym Yik / EPA / Shutterstock
When I sat down for a record interview William Weidner, then president of Sands, just before the opening of Venetian Macau in 2007, hoped he would be respectful of Adelson’s new rival. Instead, he said that on his first visit to Macau in 1980, the Lisbon casino in Ho reminded him of “the cockfighting scene in The deer hunter ”. “We in Las Vegas,” Weidner added, “couldn’t believe a place as poorly run as the Lisbon ones either. [financially] as he did “.
He remained married to his old business model to cater for high-rotation “whales” in quiet VIP rooms. But Adelson was convinced that China’s emerging middle class, when it didn’t lose money at its baccarat tables, wanted Las Vegas-style resorts, shows, and convention centers.
When it opened in the summer of 2007, the $ 2.5 billion Venetian had 3,000 hotel rooms and 1.2 square feet of convention space. As one of my impressed friends said at the time, “it’s like playing at the airport, but it’s bigger.”
The popularity of Macau’s new generation of casino complexes, which soon propelled the territory of Las Vegas as the world’s largest gambling market, proved that Adelson had a better understanding of his Chinese clientele than ever before. Ho did.
Ho, however, was not the one who admitted defeat. In his first and final note from the president of SJM, in the group’s 2008 annual report, he said the company would continue to “focus on the gaming business we know best and offer an attractive product aimed at a specific clientele. “. He also proudly described the Macau Peninsula as SJM’s “home base”.
In a sign of the group’s long drift period, from 2009 to 2017, Ambrose So, SJM’s interim CEO, would sign the opening overview of the annual reports before finally handing the pen to Daisy in 2018.
Over the next few months, and some 14 years after Macau’s Venetian transformation, SJM will finally venture into the long shadow of Ho with the opening of its integrated Grand Lisbon Palace complex in Cotai.
The timing could hardly be less auspicious, as Macau continues to falter from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. Last year, visitor arrivals and gross gaming revenue from the territory fell 85% and 79% respectively, compared to 2019. But the number of visitors finally begins to rise after Macau reopened its borders to mainland China travelers in August.
For SJM, much will depend on his appointment in June of a new chief operating officer, Frank McFadden. It originally originated at McFadden in Adelson in 2006 to oversee the opening of SJM’s current flagship casino, Grand Lisbon.
McFadden, an Irishman who often told friends he was looking forward to retirement in County Donegal, has made it clear he believes a new era is calling for SJM. “My mandate,” he said Within Asian Gaming magazine shortly after his appointment, “is about to change.”
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