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The ‘King of Gambling’ dies aged 98
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The man behind the success of Asia’s gambling capital has died at the age of 98.
Stanley Ho was the founder of one of the largest gambling businesses in the world, SJM Holdings, and is credited with transforming the island nation of Macau into a mecca for casino fans.
With an estimated fortune of around $6 billion, Ho was regularly listed on Forbes’ list of richest people in the world and his empire is still going strong today, with subsidiaries in the hotel industry as well as the gaming sector.
‘The King of Gambling’, as he was known, led a lavish lifestyle, often traveling from one resort to another via helicopter (although he was known to hate publicity) and had an exhilarating career, one that stretches back nearly 80 years to the Second World War.
Introducing casinos to Macau
After war broke out in his native Hong Kong in the early 1940s, a young Ho fled to Macau where he was able to make money smuggling goods into mainland China. Amassing a small fortune in this trade over the years, he started to look at the casino industry as a profitable venture due to the rise in tourism in the area.
Macau held one crucial advantage. Due to its status as a Portuguese colony, gambling was legal there despite its location just off the Chinese coast, where it was forbidden.
In 1962, Ho and a group of investors secured the right to run all of the city’s gambling operations, leading newly-formed SJM Holdings to go from strength to strength over the following decades.
On the back of this, Ho received a huge boost following the 1999 handover of Macau back to China. The Chinese government decided to award SJM several licenses to continue their operations, making the island the only place in China to allow gambling. Business boomed as a result. Chinese tourists, not allowed to gamble in casinos back home, or even play in casinos online, flocked to the island for a gambling holiday.
By 2013, gambling made up around half of Macau’s growing economy — earning seven times the revenue of Las Vegas — and SJM Holdings was central to that. They cemented their powerful status by building the Lotus-shaped Grand Lisboa along the way to mark their success.