Las Vegas trade mission to Shanghai promoting business with China

Elaine Kurtenbach

Tuesday, May 31, 2005 | 8:58 a.m.

SHANGHAI, China -- Las Vegas is looking East, betting that rising affluence will make China a big market for tourism and trade shows -- despite a gambling crackdown aimed at officials wagering with stolen public funds.

"China is one of Las Vegas' top emerging markets," Cam Usher, director of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, said today during a trade promotion visit to Shanghai. "We expect to work with Chinese as business partners."

There's plenty of room for growth.

There are no official figures on the number of mainland Chinese visitors to Las Vegas, though Usher said estimates ranged from 12,000 to 20,000 a year -- out of the total 37.4 million who traveled there last year.

Nevada's Tourism Commission opened an office in Beijing last year. It also has offices in Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, South Korea and Mexico.

Usher's group, which she says "Lives the Las Vegas brand," plans to attend trade shows in China and "to have more brochures" to help raise the city's profile as a destination for international conventions, entertainment, year-round golf and shopping.

It also is lobbying for direct flights from the Chinese mainland to Vegas -- visitors from Asia now must first land on the West Coast or elsewhere. Other members of the trade mission said they were seeking a loosening of U.S. visa restrictions that prevent many Chinese from visiting either for business or tourism.

"It was helpful to see the visa process firsthand," said Karen Chupka, vice president of the Consumer Electronics Association, which sponsors electronics industry exhibitions. "This is a really big problem."

CEA is co-sponsoring an industry show in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao in July -- part of an effort both to encourage Chinese attendance at U.S.-based exhibitions and to tap the growing market in Asia for such events, she said.

Members of the trade mission said they were not pushing Las Vegas as a gambling destination, and perhaps that's just as well.

Early this year China's communist leaders launched a campaign against gambling, targeting overseas gambling, online gambling and illegal lotteries. They've also urged neighboring Vietnam, Myanmar and North Korea to shut down casinos along China's borders that thrived on business from high-rolling officials gambling on the public purse.

The mainland has banned most gambling since the 1949 communist revolution. But it condones private wagering, state authorized lotteries and the booming casino business in Macau, a former Portuguese colony on the southern Chinese coast.

Industry insiders have forecast that tiny Macau may soon overtake Vegas as the world's biggest gambling market, with more than U.S. $5 billion (euro 4 billion) in annual gaming revenues.

Gambling accounts for only 15 percent of Las Vegas' revenue, compared with the 60 percent that comes from tourism, noted Karen Chen, China representative for the Nevada Tourism Commission.

"We don't feel that industry is the most important focus of our promotions," Chen said. "Gambling is a very small part of it."