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| Saturday, December 09, 2006 |
| Genting-Star Cruises consortium wins Sentosa integrated resort project |
Yahoo
SINGAPORE: The Genting International-Star Cruises consortium has aced the Sentosa integrated resort project.
The result, just announced by Deputy Prime Minister Professor S Jayakumar at a news conference, came as no surprise as analysts had picked Genting as a frontrunner right from the start.
Its S$5.2 billion Resorts World At Sentosa will leverage on international brand names like Universal Studios, which will design 16 new rides specially for the resort.
Besides the Universal Studios theme park, there will also be three other water-themed attractions, including a surf pool.
Visitors will be able to observe some 700,000 fish species in one of the world's largest oceanariums.
Genting's proposal also includes six hotels with over 1,800 rooms for both leisure and business travellers.
Earlier, market watchers had picked Genting as a favourite to win due to its Asian experience.
The resort is expected to attract 10 million visitors and generate S$15 billion in tourism receipts by 2015.
The Sentosa integrated resort is expected to be ready in 2010.
The judging panel, made up of seven ministers, explained their decision.
"Genting submitted the most compelling proposal overall that best meets our economic and tourism objectives. In particular, the proposal reflects our vision for the Sentosa IR as a large-scale, family resort with its host of world-class family leisure attractions and other strong offerings. The attractions will position Sentosa and draw a significant number of new and repeat visitors," said Prof Jayakumar.
The Deputy Prime Minister added that the Singapore government evaluated the high-quality proposals carefully, before deciding that Genting fulfilled the key criteria such as the family leisure component of 22 attractions for the upcoming Universal Studios Singapore.
This will make it comparable to the theme park in Orlando, Florida.
However, the decision also boiled down to hard-nosed calculations.
"The total project investment is S$5.2 billion, which includes the land cost of S$605 million. We made a projection and the economic contribution of Genting's contribution will be largely similar to the Marina Bay Sands proposal, which is about $2.7 billion in value-add contribution to our GDP or approximately 0.8 percent contribution to the GDP and generate about 30,000 jobs throughout the economy in the year 2015," said Trade and Industry Minister Lim Hng Kiang.
The panel said they believe the two integrated resorts at Marina and Sentosa will complement each other very well, and allow Singapore to stimulate the growth of its meetings and conventions segment as well as the leisure segment to bring Singapore closer to its Tourism 2015 targets.
During the question and answer session, the panel was also asked if there had been any political influence after Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak made a plug for greater co-operation between Singapore and Malaysian companies.
Prof Jayakumar refuted this - saying the decision was made based on the merit of the proposal and not on the issue of bilateral ties.
"Genting was selected because overall, it presented the best compelling proposal in light of the RFP requirements and this was the decision of the TAA and the tender evaluation committee and so bilateral relations was not a factor. Let me say that now that Genting is successful, we look forward to working with them to develop a world class IR and I'm sure this will bolster the strong economic ties between two countries," he said. |
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