GGRAsia – Crown Resorts reports Macau joint venture dividends

Crown Resorts reports Macau joint venture dividends

Sep 12, 2014 Newsdesk Latest News, Macau, Top of the deck, World

Australian casino company Crown Resorts Ltd received AUD68.6 million (US$62.2 million) from a Melco Crown Entertainment Ltd special dividend for 2013, and AUD25.8 million from Melco Crown’s dividend payment for the quarter ending March 31, 2014, the company said.

Crown Resorts added that its share of a Melco Crown dividend announced for the quarter ending June 30 will be US$14.5 million.

Crown Resorts gave the figures in the full annual report for its own financial year ending June 30, disclosed on Friday to the Australian Securities Exchange.

Melco Crown is a joint venture of Crown Resorts and Hong Kong-listed Melco International Development Ltd. The latter is headed by Lawrence Ho Yau Lung.

Melco Crown, which has its main listing on Nasdaq in New York, reports its full year numbers based on the January to December period.

In August, Crown Resorts said it had received AUD287.6 million as its share from Melco Crown’s latest reported yearly result, after adjusting for theoretical win rate and pre-opening costs. The figure was up 64.3 percent year-on-year.

Crown Resorts had a 33.6 percent equity interest in Melco Crown as of June 30, it told the Australian stock market.

Crown Resorts said in the filing that Studio City – an under construction casino resort on Cotai, Macau, in which Melco Crown has a 60 percent interest – remained on schedule for a “mid-2015” opening.

“Melco Crown currently estimates that the design and construction cost for the first phase of Studio City will be approximately US$2.3 billion,” said Crown Resorts in its fiscal 2014 results.

The filing also confirmed that the joint venture’s equity interest in City of Dreams Manila – a casino resort in the Philippines capital due to open late this year – stood at 68.8 percent as of the relevant reporting period.

Crown is bidding for a new casino licence in Brisbane, Queensland, and on July 8 was awarded a restricted gaming licence for a new casino resort called Crown Sydney to open in the country’s largest city “from November 2019”.

The casino operator in August said it had paid US$280 million for a site on the Las Vegas Strip. Construction for that project is expected to start late next year “with an opening anticipated as soon as 2018,” said U.S.-based Union Gaming Research LLC in a note on August 8.