Patrick Dumont
President and Chief Operating Officer at Las Vegas Sands
Thanks. It's a very interesting question. I think with the opening of China on January 8th, there hasn't been a huge influx of Chinese visitation in the early part of the quarter. But there is an ongoing ramp of outbound tourism from China, that we will be the beneficiaries from. And that's something that we've been anticipating a long time. There is not the normal level of flights. There is not the, let's call, the normal airlift capacity that you would expect during a normal run rate period, which they're going to slowly ramp into. So across the year, our expectation is that, that visitation will recover. It's such a strong market for Singapore, has been historically, and yet we're able to execute these levels without that market really contributing. So we're very bullish on the opportunity of outbound tourism from China to support Marina Bay Sands and its ultimate growth to where Rob has mentioned earlier in the call and beyond.
There is one other comment that I do want to make. We had a very interesting question from Steve just prior to yours about the level of investment that we're willing to make in Macao. And I think we're very optimistic about our investments there. It's a high return environment. We're very focused on continued investment there, not only through the fulfillment of our concession renewal, but also in general, to grow our non-gaming asset base.
But the same thing was true in Singapore. I think we're very focused on growing Singapore as a market. The opportunity there is very unique. It's a really high-value tourism market that has a different catchment area than Macao. We're very excited about the Marina Bay Sands expansion. Although, just to sort of comment on it, kind of going down that vein, we have very high expectations for return on invested capital in both these markets. But when we first went into the Marina Bay Sands expansion in 2019 and we entered into a development agreement in April of 2019, a lot of things have changed. So it's probably going to be a lot more expensive. The pandemic brought additional costs. There has been material -- labor and material cost increases. There has been significant inflation globally, as everyone knows. It's just overall market conditions.
But I think from what you see in this quarter, is that the strength in the market is on full display. We really believe that it's going to get stronger over time. And particularly with investment in high-quality tourism assets, which is what the Marina Bay Sands expansion is. But I think it's really important to note that there's been significant inflation since we began discussions a year ago. So the cost at Marina Bay Sands expansion is going be a lot higher. The good news is, the market is so good. We think the opportunity is going to be a lot stronger or will do a lot better.
So, I think to set expectations, the investments that we make, both in Macao, are going to be very strong return. We're very excited about them over the next concession periods. We're really looking forward to investing in Marina Bay Sands expansion. We think it's going to be a great asset. But both of these are going to be expensive. The good news is that we believe the returns are there or we wouldn't be doing them.
So, I don't think our investment thesis has changed in either market with the cost inflation. We believe in our long-term success in these markets. We sort of have a very long-term thesis in both of them and going to deploy capital into both in scale. And we're going to look for high returns and we feel very strongly about the opportunity in both of these markets. But I did want to say that it's going to be expensive and it's going to be worth it.
