MGM China has delayed the opening of its new Macau integrated resort, MGM Cotai, until February.
In an announcement to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Thursday afternoon, the company said it was “undergoing the administrative approval process of obtaining relevant licenses to operate MGM Cotai. As a result, it is now expected that the public opening date of MGM Cotai will be within the month of February 2018.”
The opening date had previously been announced as 29 January.
Only last month MGM released an update stating that although the hotel would still open to the public on 29 January, the official grand opening would be held on 13 February. As per this latest announcement, all operations have now been postponed until February with no exact date specified.
In a separate release, MGM Cotai said, “While still undergoing [the] government approval process, we are now focusing on our Grand Opening within the month of February.
“We are working closely with the Macau government to bring to our community and to the public a long-awaited world class resort that takes diversified consumer experiences to a new height and that thousands of our employees feel deeply proud of.”
The company added in its filing that it had reassessed its project costs and that the overall budget of the project is expected to remain unchanged at approximately HK$27 billion, excluding land and capitalized interest.
MGM Cotai has suffered a series of delays during its construction, having originally been scheduled to open in 1H17. That date was later changed to November 2017 before the company named 29 January as its official opening date following damage to the building suffered during Typhoon Hato in August last year.
News of the latest delay comes just 24 hours after Macau’s Secretary for Economy and Finance, Lionel Leong Vai Tac, revealed that MGM Cotai would be granted 125 new-to-market gaming tables, with 100 available upon opening and the other 25 becoming available to MGM Cotai on 1 January 2019. The figure was lower than consensus expectations of 150.
In seperate statements made on Thursday, Leong also revealed that all 125 tables granted to MGM Cotai were for the mass market, with the aim of promoting further development in that segment.
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