Macau needs to be a ‘business city,’ not simply the world’s gaming hub

Speaking on the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8, Alex Che Weng Keong, president of the board of administrators of the Commerce and Investment Promotion Institute of the Macao SAR, cited an attention-grabbing function mannequin: Las Vegas. The world’s different main playing hub has proven a on line casino city may also turn into a “world-class venue…for business, exchange, conferences, and exhibitions,” Che stated.

Gaming nonetheless accounts for roughly 45% of Macau’s GDP, and the industry supplies about 80% of the federal government’s tax income. The metropolis’s new five-year plan—the third since Portugal returned Macau to Chinese rule in 1999, masking 2026 to 2030—commits some 130 billion patacas ($16.1 billion) to what Che known as “rising industries. The plan additionally hopes to have non-gaming industries contribute 60% of GDP by 2030.

Macau, one in every of China’s two particular administrative areas alongside Hong Kong, retains its personal foreign money, authorized system, and customs territory. For Che, Macau can now use that autonomy to draw “emerging industries” that want regulatory flexibility.

“Emerging industries often need different kinds of regulatory approaches and different ways for talent to move,” he stated. Macau “can leverage our position as an independent economy with an independent legislative system and independent regulatory system, and then invest a very large amount.”

Central to that plan is the Guangdong-Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone in Hengqin, a 106-square-kilometer island subsequent to the Macau border. Che known as Hengqin “a very important factor for the Greater Bay Area’s future development” and “a major national strategy for empowering Macau.”

Macau’s different promoting level is its heritage. A former Portuguese colony, it retains Portuguese as an official language and a civil-law authorized system, which Che stated “gives us a real convenience when it comes to trade and building partnerships with European countries or Portuguese-speaking countries.”

“When Macao’s Chief Executive went to Portugal, who did he meet? The President, the Prime Minister, the Speaker of Parliament, the head of the Supreme Court,” he added. “Once government channels are established, business follow-through—whether investment or cooperation—becomes much easier.”

Macau is the smallest of the 11 cities within the Greater Bay Area, a cluster that features Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, counts 87 million residents, and generates roughly $2 trillion in output—bigger than Spain or Australia. 

Yet the area stays lower than the sum of its components, argued Edward Au, southern area managing companion for Deloitte China, who joined Che on the panel.

“We already have a lot of world-class points of innovation, but we don’t yet feel that they’re connected into a world-class innovation network,” Au stated.

The repair, he urged, is a “clearer division of labor”: Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou main on “open, cutting-edge innovation,” manufacturing hubs like Dongguan and Foshan enjoying a “mid-stream engineering role,” and Macau and Hengqin carving out “their own niche in traditional Chinese medicine, big health, and the data-technology market.”

Che expressed a hope that folks might need a extra expansive view of Macau by 2036–and never simply by way of breaking freed from its fame as a on line casino hub. 

“When people talk about Macao, [they] won’t just mean the 33.4 square kilometers of the peninsula—they’ll also include Hengqin’s 106 square kilometers, so that externally our image becomes that of a unified ‘tech city,’” he stated. “That’s the goal we’re working toward over the next decade.”