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Sheldon Adelson, founder and owner of Las Vegas Sands (LVS), won $690 million on December 15 2004, in the most profitable initial public offering (IPO) in the American gaming industry.

Las Vegas Sands is the company that owns the Venetian Hotel & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip and Sands Resort in Macau, a former Portuguese colony, nowadays reinstated to China.

The company sold nearly 24 million shares, that sum as little as 6.8 percent of LVS. According to some financial analysts, being such a tiny percent, it certainly put a pressure on the price, that went up 60%. "Today's price was a matter of supply and demand," said John Futrell of Futrell Financial Management on Wednesday. "Too little supply and a lot of demand. The fact that so few shares were available influenced the price."

LVS set an opening price of $29 per share Tuesday evening; it is probably worth mentioning that bankers involved in the sale prophesied an initial price between $24 to $26, prior to the IPO. However, the stock priced at $36.01 when the market opened and reached a high of $49.45 by 1 p.m. EST, when it started to scale back.

This was a record gain for American IPO's this year and the best since Jet Blue in May 2002, that surged 67%.

LVS Chairman Sheldon Adelson, 71, owns an 87.9% slice of the company, while company managers and directors share together 5.3 %.

The money are to be invested in the development of The Palazzo - a $1.6 billion Beverly Hills-themed resort, additional to the Venetian and a $1.8 billion Venetian-style casino/resort in Macau. Palazzo will feature 3,000 suites and double the size of Venetian's casino and retail space.

The Venetian is one of the most famed Strip locations, built by Sheldon Adelson on the former site of Sands Hotel and Casino, home of the fabulous Rat Pack boys in the sixties.

Sands Resort in Macau has 329 table games and about 670 slot machines or similar gaming devices. The company plans to build a hotel and convention center with 3,000 suites, 546,000 square feet of gaming facilities and 1 million square feet of gross retail space.

Macau tends to become the leading gaming destination in the world, with the Chinese government recently loosening travel restrictions in Macau and the Asians having such a natural attraction for gambling.