Shun Tak’s current projects include the ambitious Nam Van site project, adjacent to the Macau Tower it manages.

As Chief Executive Edmund Ho’s government concerns itself with meeting ever greater demands on infrastructure capacity in Macau, Pansy Ho, Managing Director of Shun Tak Holdings Limited, has been busy developing multiple transport projects to effectively deal with Macau’s rising visitor numbers, and those yet to come. The Macau Special Administrative Region will receive 20 million tourists in 2005, a remarkable number for a territory of only 10 square miles (26 square kilometers) and a population of just 450,000.

Moreover, with the central Chinese government’s decision to relax travel restrictions for 200 million people in nearby provinces, and new talk of doing away with cross border checks altogether in the future, visitor numbers are guaranteed to skyrocket. Consequently, Shun Tak, which owns Asia’s largest high-speed jetfoil fleet and which has an 80% market share of the lucrative Hong Kong-Macau ferry route, is set to expand its entire passenger transportation network throughout the Pearl River Delta region. The company launched its TurboJET Sea Express Service from the Hong Kong International Airport in late 2003, a complement to its Honk Kong-Macau and Macau-Shenzhen routes, and recorded the highest ever turnover in its transport division in 2004 with a passenger increase of 132% on its mainland route to Shenzhen.

PANSY HO Managing Director of Shun Tak Holdings Limited

Now, according to Ms. Ho, Shun Tak will expand its ferry routes and ports, as well as venture into other transport sectors such as air charter and cross-border coach services. She comments: “Shun Tak has always been involved in non-gaming sectors in Macau and now we will take an even stronger and more direct presence and focus on bringing in more supplementary services. With our ferry operations, we are not only expanding our fleet size but also our route numbers, and in the future we will move from our basic Hong Kong-Macau operation to a whole network of sea ferry services and different package products.”

In its property development division, Shun Tak manages the Macau Tower Convention and Entertainment Center, and owns two leading five-star hotels and the only 18-hole golf course in Macau. Current projects include the development of the three million-square-foot (279,000-square meter) Nam Van site adjacent to the Macau Tower on the peninsula, which will house a shopping center, residential units, a hotel with a casino and office space. Another project, on the island of Taipa, is one of Macau’s largest-ever residential complexes with a total of 5,500 apartments. The first 2,100 units in phase one of the Nova Taipa project sold out immediately, and a further 1,788 blocks in phase two are scheduled for completion in 2008.

Ambassadors of the city and Macau experts, Shun Tak and Pansy Ho are the perfect partners for companies who want to invest there.

Furthermore, Ms. Ho has also signed an agreement with Las Vegas’s MGM Mirage to build the MGM Grand Macau, a $1 billion mega-casino-hotel project to be located on the peninsula waterfront next to the future Wynn Resorts hotel and casino. Scheduled to open in 2007, the resort will boast 600 rooms, suites and villas, a casino with 300 tables and 1,000 slot machines, a spa, retail and convention spaces, and a variety of entertainment facilities.

Ms. Ho says that the number of new players and the variety of mega-projects now under construction in Macau will widen its tourism offer and lead to a more sophisticated industry, but is unlikely to become a carbon copy of Las Vegas. “Las Vegas was a miracle in the sense that it was a desert that was built up from nothing,” she says, “but Macau is different as we already have a heritage and culture. Macau is the oldest port in China, the place where the Portuguese first landed and where they initiated trade between the East and the West, so there is a lot here and we are much richer in terms of the fabric of society. This is why I think that in the future Macau will draw visitors from the medium- and longer-haul markets as well.”