Cirque du Soleil, a global theatrical entertainment company from Canada noted for mounting high quality shows in major cities, has shown typical attention to detail in its dealings with Las Vegas Sands Corp. in Macau.
When Cirque introduced its ZAIA production to The Venetian Macao, it hedged against the risk that the market was immature and that punters wouldn’t turn up in the numbers seen in most of Cirque’s areas of operation.
“When we did the agreement with Sands, we told them it would take three years to build a show. So we negotiated a profit guarantee for the first three years,” says Cirque’s CEO Daniel Lamarre.
“We’re very happy we did that,” adds M. Lamarre, in what must be one of the understatements of the year.
Cirque pulled off another astute piece of business in August when it sold a 20 percent stake in the company to two units of Dubai World, the Dubai government’s investment arm, just before the meltdown in the global financial system.
The mothballing of LVS’s new Cotai projects means that a second Cirque show planned for Macau has to find a new home. Cirque may not have to look too far, given that Dubai World also owns 9.4 percent of MGM Mirage and that the Las Vegas operator is a 50:50 partner with Pansy Ho in MGM GRAND Macau. The production might need to adopt a flea circus format though. Although the MGM GRAND Macau resort has 1,452 square meters of convention space and an 807 sq.m. ballroom, it doesn’t yet have the 1,500 seater theatre envisaged with the original design.
Since its creation in 1984, Cirque du Soleil has entertained more than 80 million spectators in over two hundred different cities on five continents. The company currently has eight touring shows and seven resident shows around the world and plans to open new shows in Los Angeles, Japan and Dubai in the near future. In 2009, Cirque says it will present 20 shows simultaneously throughout the world.
