Speaking at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept. 8, Alex Che Weng Keong, president of the board of directors of the Commerce and Investment Promotion Institute of the Macao SAR, cited an interesting role model: Las Vegas. The world’s other major gambling hub has shown a casino town can also become a “world-class venue…for business, exchange, conferences, and exhibitions,” Che said.

Gaming still accounts for roughly 45% of Macau’s GDP, and the industry supplies about 80% of the government’s tax revenue. The city’s new five-year plan—the third since Portugal returned Macau to Chinese rule in 1999, covering 2026 to 2030—commits some 130 billion patacas ($16.1 billion) to what Che called “emerging industries. The plan also hopes to have non-gaming industries contribute 60% of GDP by 2030.

Macau, one of China’s two special administrative regions alongside Hong Kong, keeps its own currency, legal system, and customs territory. For Che, Macau can now use that autonomy to attract “emerging industries” that need regulatory flexibility.

“Emerging industries often need different kinds of regulatory approaches and different ways for talent to move,” he said. Macau “can leverage our position as an independent economy with an independent legislative system and independent regulatory system, and then invest a very large amount.”

Central to that plan is the Guangdong-Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone in Hengqin, a 106-square-kilometer island next 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.”

Macau’s other selling point is its heritage. A former Portuguese colony, it 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.”

“When Macao’s Chief Executive went to Portugal, who did he meet? The President, the Prime Minister, the Speaker of Parliament, the head of the Supreme Court,” he added. “Once government channels are established, business follow-through—whether investment or cooperation—becomes 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—larger than Spain or Australia. 

Yet the region remains less than the sum of its parts, argued Edward Au, southern region managing partner for Deloitte China, who joined Che on the panel.

“We already have a lot of world-class points of innovation, but we don’t yet feel that they’re connected into a world-class innovation network,” Au said.

The fix, he suggested, is a “clearer division of labor”: Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou leading on “open, cutting-edge innovation,” manufacturing hubs like Dongguan and Foshan playing a “mid-stream engineering role,” and Macau and Hengqin carving out “their own niche in traditional Chinese medicine, big health, and the data-technology market.”

Che expressed a hope that people might have a more expansive view of Macau by 2036–and not just in terms of breaking free of its reputation as a casino hub. 

“When people talk about Macao, [they] won’t just mean the 33.4 square kilometers of the peninsula—they’ll also include Hengqin’s 106 square kilometers, so that externally our image becomes that of a unified ‘tech city,'” he said. “That’s the goal we’re working toward over the next decade.”