Game Changer

With the opening of her latest ambitious project, Pansy Ho is helping to steer Macau in a new direction, broadening its appeal beyond gaming. The billionaire businesswoman and art collector tells Marianna Cerini about the cultural concept at the heart of MGM Cotai.

- Marianna Cerini

‘‘I know my fair share, particularly when it comes to Macau,” says Pansy Ho of her encyclopaedic knowledge of the economies and prospects of Hong Kong and Macau. “I like to get people as involved and interested in the city’s potential as I am,” continues the eldest daughter of casino mogul Stanley Ho, one of the region’s most accomplished businesswomen. And her latest project to come to fruition, MGM Cotai, shows just how interested she is—and how valuable that interest is.

Five years in the making, the HK$27 billion development is a sight to behold. A few numbers give a sense of its breathtaking scale. With four million square feet of floor space, it accommodates 300,000sqft of casino facilities, including 177 gaming tables and over 900 slot machines, 1,390 guest rooms, and a pillar-free ballroom able to entertain 1,000 people. Then there’s the Spectacle, a vast atrium four storeys high and stretching the length or a soccer field that envelops a retail, dining and leisure complex flooded with natural light. The Spectacle is also home to the world’s largest area of permanent indoor LED screens, which switch between dramatic scenic landscapes and stunning works of digital art, and features the world’s biggest indoor garden, a green paradise of 100,000 plants representing 2,000 species, some of them resurrected from extinction with the aid of botanical garden seed banks.