this is not Las Vegas this is Macau and even though it's part of China it really makes you
think you're actually in Sin City see Las Vegas has the strip Macau has the Strip Las Vegas has
an Eiffel Tower Macau has an Eiffel Tower Las Vegas has the Venetian Resort Macau has the
Venetian Las Vegas has MGM Macau has MGM Las Vegas has the win Macau has a win but hold up Macau does
not have a big Ben see Macau has its own London themed hotel so they copied London I mean inside
this New London themed hotel they have a big Ben red buses phone booths 10 Downing Street and they
even have this it's a changing of the guards but the guards break out into dance and it's
not just the London hotel that makes this place different the Venetian in Las Vegas has a five
dollar minimum bet on its tables the Venetian in Macau you'll need 125 dollars just to play
so why does China have its very very own copy and paste version of Las Vegas and why and how
does the casino revenue here bring in way more than Las Vegas and how has Macau become one of
the wealthiest places on Earth Macau is a special administrative region of China it has its own set
of rules immigration and even currency Mainland Chinese can easily come here it was in the 2000s
that Macau started to take off as it became the only place in China where casinos were legal fast
forward to today you have 1.4 billion people that can get to Macau within a short drive or
a few hour plane ride gaming here now accounts for 80 percent of its tax revenue Macau is often
called the Las Vegas of China or the Las Vegas of Asia but if you think Vegas is the global
capital of gaming check this out Macau brought in six times more Revenue than Las Vegas that
was before the pandemic that same year this tiny region welcomed almost 40 million visitors things
have been slow here though over the past couple of years as gaming came to a halt over certain
policies but now it's quickly surging again but how does this place have so many high rollers well
China is now home to a massive number of rich people in 2019 it became official there were
more Chinese than Americans if you looked at the world's top 10 percent of richest people another
reason Macau makes so much money is this high stakes tables I got told to stop filming a few
times but I tried anyway the minimum bet on tables here is insane and the Venetian it was 125 dollars
for a single bet while in other casinos I visited it was 250 this is drastically different from Las
Vegas where the Venetian minimum is just five or ten dollars and while Las Vegas is very famous for
its slot machines Macau focuses on high stakes tables here they also have high stake areas and
insanely lavish VIP rooms but revenues coming from Macau versus Las Vegas are actually very different
only about a third of Vegas's Revenue comes from the casino but in Macau that's more than 80
percent Saint Macau is much more centered around gaming if you're coming to Macau you're here to
gamble while Las Vegas is a much more Diversified entertainment destination from insane shows to
restaurants and shopping gaming is just a piece of the business in Macau you see much less emphasis
on the shows nightclubs and even luxury shopping Las Vegas casinos entered the Macau Market in the
early 2000s this was after the Macau government ended the decades-long Monopoly of local casino
Tycoon Stanley ho see this opened up the market to foreign Casino operators and Vegas companies
quickly saw massive potential Las Vegas Sands was the first to enter the Macau Market in 2004 with
the opening of the Sans Macau then it opened many more like the Venetian wind Resorts and MGM today
Las Vegas companies dominate the Macau gaming market with the majority of the largest and most
profitable casinos owned and operated by Las Vegas companies the Venetian Macau is now the largest
casino in the world while other major casinos like the wind Macau MGM Macau and Galaxy Macau are also
owned and operated by Vegas so how did Macau get here well Macau is a former Portuguese colony in
the 1500s the Portuguese came to Macau and set up a trading Port they thought it was a very good
place to trade with other countries in Asia for over 400 years Macau was ruled by the Portuguese
during this time Macau became a very important place for trading between China and Europe it
was a place where many people learned about Christianity Macau has many historic buildings
that are a mix of Chinese and Portuguese Styles in 1999 Macau was returned to Chinese control and it
was only shortly after that where it began setting up its roots to become a massively profitable
gaming Hub as a result of the last few decades Macau has become one of the richest places on
Earth in fact its GDP per capita is more than 115 thousand dollars it's become such a wealthy place
it even hands out money to its residents this is called the wealth partaking scheme it distributes
a portion of the city's Gaming revenue to its residence it was first introduced back in 2000 8
as a way to help distribute the city's wealth more evenly and help offset the rising cost of living
each resident here could be given twelve hundred dollars a year but to qualify they must have lived
in Macau for at least five years and meet certain income requirements while the pandemic brought
Macau to a screeching halt and made many wonder if it could ever come back my take is this Macau
is literally a copy and paste job of Las Vegas but for the companies that run them in Vegas and set
them up back in early 2000s well they couldn't have had a better Gamble and now given the rise
of China and the surgeon wealth of its citizens this place which has always been in the shadows
of Vegas has become such a massive money-making City that it deserves to have knockoffs of its own
thanks so much for watching let me know in the comments what do
you think about China's massive gaming Hub of Macau while you're at it check
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