Animal Farm | The divine rule of three!

Albano Martins

In 2013 the Macao Government decided to set a ceiling of growth in gaming tables at three percent. Economically, for the industry and for the government coffers, this measure makes no sense. However, we might well presume the origin of the brilliant authorship and the logic of this impost. A magic rule that fell from the sky? Of course not.

It was, however, so magical that nobody has been able to determine even today why it was three, not four, five or any other percentage number.

As the Government says nothing – and I believe it doesn’t know – this magic formula has become a divine decree!

The industry does not dispute this decision – for obvious reasons of course: not to displease the power. They do however look to their huge investment of tens of billions in new casinos just to be stuck with a dozen miserable tables!

Who should decide the number of tables should be the entrepreneur, just as those selling cars decide how many cars to import!

In an economy that likes to call itself free, such an imposition is absurd and an attack on the rules of a free market and the foundation of economic efficiency. Such an imposition has, moreover, a pernicious effect on income lost by the Macao Government itself!

This brilliant idea was conceived to stop competitors from advancing along Cotai, so as to prevent the growth of the operators in an area where everything indicated the most investments would be made.
Today this aberration bothers the intelligence of ordinary mortals!

Thus, there were 5,485 gambling tables in Macau in 2012, as per the official numbers on the DICJ website! Of course it is not difficult to know where they all were.

In the first quarter of 2018, there were 6,586 tables distributed across all operators. Curiously, the DICJ that reveals the number of annual casinos per operator, does not reveal the number of tables each one has! Discounting the tables that existed in 2012 in the hands of a single operator, it is easy to realize that today, in 2018, in almost six full years, only 1,101 tables will have been distributed to the remaining five!

If we apply the Machiavellian formula of the three percent annual growth of the tables, by the year 2023 the total number of tables will be around 7,595, something like 2,110 more than in the period before the liberalization of the gaming industry.

Today, at the end of the first quarter of 2018, 35 more tables (6,586) were already distributed more than were supposed to be at the end of the year (6,567)! We can conclude that there is yet to be distributed by late 2023 something like 1,009 tables, which gives, if all the operators receive equally, which is unlikely, something like 168 tables per operator. That is, about 28 tables / year per operator, if equality prevails!

The magic will be turned against the sorcerer when later this year or into the next the palace is complete.

Theoretically there are only 162 tables remaining to be distributed by the end of 2019!

So many billions of investment for just over a hundred tables? Ridiculous!

I guess there will be a lot of fight by these tribes, as the transfer of tables from other casinos to the palace will place the Secretary of Security in a position to have to put around the place more CCTVs. Or else we may have a fire on our hands!

Nothing is created, everything is transformed, said Lavoisier, guillotined on May 8, 1794, 224 years ago, by order of the presiding judge of the court that judged him, Jean-Baptiste Coffinhal, who uttered a sentence that made history: “France does not need scientists.”

The mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange summed up this loss; Laviosier being thrown into a common grave: “It took them only an instant to cut off that head, but France may not produce another like it in a century.”

It’s those mathematicians we need!