Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas Sands, the international mega-casino and resort company with a market capitalisation of US$65 billion, finally on Friday officially took its Bethlehem Pennsylvania casino property off the market, after several months of unconfirmed rumours there was a deal in the works to sell it to fellow billionaire Carl Icahn’s Tropicana Entertainment.
In a recent quarterly earnings call, Sheldon Adelson was full of acclaim for both Las Vegas Sands achievements, and its future growth potential, in far-flung places such as Macau, and Singapore. In contrast, even Las Vegas itself, which used to be the cornerstone of the company and its most prolific cash cow, is now already a much smaller piece of the Las Vegas Sands global pie.
And as for their casino in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which pulled in a scant US$117 million in the first quarter in net revenues it had been semi-publicly up for sale for quite a while and got no mention at all.
Rumors have abounded for some months, however, that Carl Icahn’s Tropicana Entertainment was in line to buy the Bethlehem property, and that a deal was ready to go once there was a handshake between the two billionaires.
Already a month ago the local paper there, The Morning Call, ran a major article on a possible pending purchase, with town Mayor Robert Donchez saying, carefully, then “I’ve heard the rumors like everyone else, but I’ve heard nothing directly from the Sands or any possible buyer,” adding that Sands’ interim President Douglas Niethold had told him that the Bethlehem casino was not yet sold, but that “for the last 1 1/2 years there probably have been discussions on selling it.”
Exactly what was on the table with Tropicana Entertainment then remained unclear, but sources told the paper that at least one model would have Las Vegas Sands sell the Sands casino, hotel, shopping mall and concert venue to Tropicana Entertainment. But all the spare real estate, including vacant former Bethlehem Steel buildings and the blast furnaces west of the casino – would be spun out and sold instead as development land for future development to a group of Bethlehem and New York investors who currently hold a minority share of the total property.
Well, instead, on Friday, Las Vegas Sands announced it now has no intention of selling its market-leading property in Pennsylvania and, in fact, is working on a variety of concepts in which the company would further invest in the property.