Macau’s Macau business city plan, backed by 130 billion patacas ($16.1 billion) in its new five-year programme, aims to shift the world’s largest gambling hub away from near-total reliance on casinos by 2030, the head of the city’s trade and investment promotion body has said.
Alex Che Weng Keong, president of the board of directors of the Commerce and Investment Promotion Institute of the Macao SAR, told the Fortune Leaders Forum on 8 September that Macau must move from being a ‘tourism city’ to a ‘business city.’
He pointed to Las Vegas as a model, saying the Nevada resort strip had shown a casino town could also become a ‘world-class venue for business, exchange, conferences, and exhibitions.’
Non-gaming target set against a clear baseline
Gaming still accounts for roughly 45% of Macau’s GDP and supplies about 80% of government tax revenue. The new five-year plan, covering 2026 to 2030, sets a target of raising the share of value added from non-gaming industries to around 60% of GDP by 2030, according to Macau Post Daily.
That target requires a measurable shift. Non-gaming sectors contributed 56.7% of GDP in 2024, Macau Post Daily reported, meaning the plan calls for a further gain of roughly three percentage points over six years.
Che said Macau’s status as an independent economy with its own legislative and regulatory systems gave it an advantage in attracting industries that need regulatory flexibility. ‘Emerging industries often need different kinds of regulatory approaches and different ways for talent to move,’ he said.
Macau business city ambitions hinge on Hengqin island
Central to the Macau business city plan is the Guangdong-Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone in Hengqin, a 106-square-kilometre island adjacent to the Macau border. Che called Hengqin ‘a very important factor for the Greater Bay Area’s future development’ and ‘a major national strategy for empowering Macau.’
He said that by 2036 he hoped people would no longer think of Macau purely as the 33.4-square-kilometre peninsula. ‘When people talk about Macao, [they] won’t just mean the 33.4 square kilometres of the peninsula, they’ll also include Hengqin’s 106 square kilometres, so that externally our image becomes that of a unified “tech city,”‘ he said.
Macau’s Portuguese colonial heritage also features in the pitch to investors. The city retains Portuguese as an official language and a civil-law legal system, which Che said ‘gives us a real convenience when it comes to trade and building partnerships with European countries or Portuguese-speaking countries.’
He described how Macau’s chief executive had met Portugal’s president, prime minister, speaker of parliament, and head of the supreme court on a recent visit, arguing that established government channels made commercial follow-through ‘much easier.’
Macau is the smallest of the 11 cities in the Greater Bay Area, a cluster that includes Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, counts 87 million residents, and generates roughly $2 trillion in output.
Edward Au, southern region managing partner for Deloitte China, who joined Che on the panel, said the region still lacked the connectivity of a ‘world-class innovation network’ despite its individual strengths. He argued for a clearer division of labour, with Macau and Hengqin carving out a niche in ‘traditional Chinese medicine, big health, and the data-technology market.’
The five-year plan is the third Macau has adopted since Portugal returned the territory to Chinese rule in 1999.
