News that the opening date for MGM Cotai has been pushed back by up to six months, with the new date now set for sometime around March 2017, should come as neither a surprise nor a negative.
MGM Resorts CEO Jim Murren informed analysts late last week that the opening of MGM’s latest Macau resort had been delayed by anywhere between one and two quarters due to the city’s current gaming climate and competition from other properties due to open in the second half of 2016.
But MGM Cotai – originally due to open in the third quarter of 2016 – is far from the first of Cotai’s new resorts to revise its opening date, with Wynn Cotai, the Parisian and Louis XIII having all set their opening dates back previously.
In a recent interview with WGM, MGM China CEO Grant Bowie said the company was still working on exactly where MGM Cotai would sit in the rapidly evolving Macau market.
“What we’re trying to do is focus on this whole process of entertainment and entertaining,” Bowie said. “It doesn’t mean we have to entertain the customer all the time. The first thing we want to do is create space and create opportunities people can actually engage with but feel they’re creating their own sense of entertainment. It’s not about us trying to out-scale any of our friends that live around us.
“We need Wynn, we need the Venetian and we need City of Dreams. I focus on those ones because they’re the closest cluster to us and we want people to move backwards and forwards.
“What we need in Cotai is still a work in progress because all the certainties that we had are basically going out the window.”
