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For Alice Chan, who grew up in Macau, the labor crunch has been better than a lucky streak at a blackjack table. A recent graduate of Macau's hotel-management school, Chan, 23, passed up an offer from a Macau hotel to take a guest-relations position at the Sands last February. Her starting salary of $875 a month was about 30% more than what she had expected. But when the Sands delayed her starting date, a depleted bank account forced her to look for something else. In May, she landed a position as a flight attendant for Air Macau. Her minimum salary: $1,500 a month. She immediately bought herself a motorbike, and took a vacation last year to Los Angeles. "I'm afraid I've gotten spoiled," Chan says.
No one symbolizes the new Macau better than Fiona Ngan, who, at 27, is managing a 400-room hotel, the Casa Real. Two years ago, the Macau native was a few days away from beginning a job as a credit analyst at Ernst & Young in Hong Kong when she received a phone call from her father asking her to come home. The economy was set to boom, he told her, and her services were in demand. Ngan was perplexed. She hadn't lived in Macau for 10 years—she attended both high school and college in Australia—and hadn't anticipated returning. For young and career-driven Ngan, Macau was the sleepy village where she grew up, not a place for an ambitious businesswoman. "I wanted someplace more competitive, with more advantages," she says.
But as a good daughter in a Chinese family, Ngan followed dad's orders. He already operated VIP gambling rooms in Macau, but wanted to acquire a hotel of his own. He handed the inexperienced Ngan the project. She and her brother negotiated to buy a dilapidated hotel near Macau's ferry terminal and an office block next door that had been vacant for seven years. The two buildings were renovated and launched in October as the Casa Real, with the old office tower converted into a casino (operated by Stanley Ho). Ngan chose all of the Portuguese-style dcor herself, and proudly shows off the suites with models of sailing ships, upholstered sofas, and bathrooms with brass faucets shaped like geese. Today, Ngan is home to stay. "This city is going to be hot," she says.
Feeling that heat is Stanley Ho, who, after years of having the city to himself, is suddenly finding himself having to compete against some of the sharpest gaming operators in the world. In just the few months since their grand openings, the two foreign-operated casinos—the Sands and the Waldo—have claimed about 25% of the gaming revenues. The Sands is also creating an entirely new, mass gambling market—centered on the millions of regular-Joe tourists flooding into Macau—that Stanley Ho long ignored in favor of high rollers. The Ho family seems to look on the criticism of their lost monopoly with a tinge of bitterness. Without the monopoly, Macau "wouldn't even have a gaming operation today," says Pansy Ho, Stanley's daughter and the managing director of the Shun Tak Group. "There could never have been another way."