Adelson to bring Eiffel Tower to Macau Sands China is planning to invest at least $2.5bn in Macau on a Paris-themed resort featuring a fake Eiffel Tower, as the company continues its aggressive expansion in a gaming market despite a slowdown in the Chinese economy. Michael Leven, president of Las Vegas Sands which controls the Macau subsidiary, said the new 3,000-room resort known as "The Parisian," with a 160m Eiffel Tower replica, would be financed with $900m in cash and the rest in bank loans. "I have always believed that this industry is supply-driven," said Sheldon Adelson, chairman and founder of LVS. The company is planning to begin pre-construction work in November on the project, its fifth in the territory, while awaiting final government approval. Mr Adelson was in Macau on Thursday to unveil the second phase of the Sands Cotai Central resort, the group's fourth resort in Macau, which features a new casino and a Sheraton hotel which will have 4,000 rooms when fully open next year. The 79-year-old is widely accredited with creating the Cotai Strip in Macau, an area of newly reclaimed land that was transformed into a row of large, Las Vegas-style casinos after Macau opened up its gaming industry in 2002. Since the opening of Sands Macau in 2004 - the first foreign-owned casino - the city's annual gaming revenue has grown exponentially to hit $33.5bn last year, more than five times that of Las Vegas. However, there are growing concerns of saturation given that a number of large projects are opening in the next few years just as year-on-year growth in casino revenue slipped to 5.5 per cent in August. Galaxy Entertainment is spending $2bn on the expansion of its Galaxy Macau resort in Cotai, which is located next to Mr Adelson's Venetian Macau, the first major resort to open in Cotai, in 2007. Steve Wynn, Mr Adelson's rival in the US, also announced plans for a new $4bn resort in June. Mr Adelson said he was confident that the gaming industry had barely scratched the surface of Chinese demand, saying that only about 2 per cent of China's population visited Macau, compared with 13 per cent of the US population that visited Las Vegas. LVS, which this month announced it would build a $22bn "EuroVegas" in Madrid, is also eyeing other Asian countries where it could expand its portfolio of casinos beyond Macau and Singapore, where it owns the Marina Bay Sands. Mr Adelson said he was interested in Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. He said that Taiwan, which in July decided to allow casinos on an outlying island, had no appeal unless it allowed casinos to be built in either Taipei or Kaohsiung. Shares in Hong Kong-listed Sands China, which reported a 19 per cent drop in first-half net profit in July, fell 1 per cent on Thursday.