The ‘King of Gambling’ dies aged 98

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.

Health battles and declining wealth

In recent years, Ho’s poor health — he suffered a head injury in a fall in 2009 — saw him take a step back from running the business on a day-to-day basis. Having 17 children with four wives, he decided to hand over control to several of them, but this led to a dispute between some of them over shares. As a result, the tycoon’s fortune declined as the wealth was spread across the family. 

SJM Holdings dropped off the Forbes Global 2000 list in 2016, but continues to have a strong presence with 20 successful casinos and four hotels. The company also recently finished building the huge Grand Lisboa Palace which will have 1,900 suites, state-of-the-art entertainment facilities, and an in-built casino for good measure when it opens to the public.

Macau is still booming as a tourist destination, and this is largely thanks to Stanley Ho.

The growth of his business and the city can be linked together, and the entrepreneur opened up the enclave to the outside world.

While his company had some troubles – it was hit as part of a Chinese government crackdown on corruption in 2014 – Ho was still hailed as a patriotic entrepreneur by Chinese state-run TV when hearing of his death, and his success is seen as an inspiration to many poor people in Macau, China and beyond.

A continuing legacy

Ho is survived by three of his four wives and all of his children, including Pansy Ho, who was named Hong Kong’s richest woman by Bloomberg in 2018 and his 25-year-old son Mario, who recently paid nearly $65 million for a mansion in one of Hong Kong’s richest neighbourhoods.

The King of Gambling may have died but millions of people will flock to Macau for a bet in the future. In each one, Stanley Ho’s legacy lives on.