Slot machines Photo: VCG

Macao may hold a winning hand in the form of its gambling industry amid an economic diversification push and make itself into a major exporter of gaming products, said the head of a local business association. 

The transition from being import-heavy in terms of gaming devices such as slot machines is still a long way off, but the addition of Huawei to a US trade blacklist is serving as a wakeup call for Macao to muse about making slot machines on its own, Kevin Ho King Lun, president of the Industry and Commerce Association of Macau (INCA), told the Global Times in an interview on Monday.

Take the slot machines installed in Macao's casinos. They are mostly made in the US, Australia and Japan. But if one day the US suspends selling those machines to Macao, a move that might be copied by Australia and Japan, the city's gaming sector could be paralyzed overnight, Ho explained. 

This concern is driving the development of Macao's proprietary gaming devices, a vision fitting into the push for industrial innovation and potentially catapulting Macao into a sizable city with exports, he explained. 

Exports are a lesser-known part of the local economy. Macao's exports, which are mostly clothes and textiles, wine and tobacco, diamond jewelry, and machinery and transport equipment, jumped 9.6 percent year-on-year to 1.17 billion Macao patacas ($145.89 million) in October, mainly driven by re-exports, according to local official data.

Photo: GT

The Chinese answer to Las Vegas raked in 269.62 billion Macao patacas in gross gaming revenue in the first 11 months of the year, according to data from the city's Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau.

By comparison, the western US state of Nevada, home to Las Vegas, collected $12 billion in gaming revenues in the 12 months ended on October 31, showed figures from the Nevada Gaming Control Board - only about one-third of Macao's total.

Macao's reputation as the world's casino capital is a foundation for its future emergence in gambling machine maker, market watchers said.

The size of the global slot machine market is forecast to exceed $24 billion by 2022, according to an industry report published in September 2018.

"Gambling machines made in Macao, the world's largest gambling city, are likely to be well-received across the globe," Ho at INCA said.

Macao could be heading efforts to make chips used in playing cards and develop the probability algorithms for slot machines, he suggested, and the gaming devices could be made in many industrial estates in the city that lie empty or be outsourced to other places.