The Société des Bains de Mer (SBM) asked 400 surplus bedrooms to be built for the year 2003 and plans to make the Sporting d'Hiver a hotel as the Hermitage extension.
Like French Riviera, Monegasque tourism is experimenting an exceptional boom. The SBM benefits from that and plans are pending. The firm annual general meeting which is at the same time the biggest employer in Monaco (more than 3,000 employees) shows a boom even more impressing because the beginning of the 90s had been a bad period.
The 1999 fiscal year which was closed in March 2000 shows a 2 billion franc turnover (the same as last year), but it has a profit that has increased (157 MF versus 125 MF last year). The investments have doubled (231 MF vs 110 MF) because of the summer Sporting renovation, the creation of the Alain Ducasse Bar and Bœuf (80 million francs), the development of the Vistamar restaurant at hotel Hermitage and repairing engaged in Hotel de Paris.
And it has just begun! The SBM has launched a very important investment program with the creation of a new 300 room-hotel on the Larvotto peninsula (the works have begun), and the extension of the Monte-Carlo Beach Hotel. About 1.2 billion francs will be invested to give the Principality 400 extra bedrooms for 2003. Actually, Monaco had to widen its hotel reception capacity after the opening last summer of the Grimaldi Forum and the building of the Port Hercule floating sea wall.
The SBM which is the Principality tourism armed arm (Monaco owns 69% of the firm shares, which is quoted at the Paris Stock Exchange), has planned to widen the hotel reception capacity. Other projects are being studied: transformation of the winter Sporting into a hotel, extension of the Hermitage hotel, development of the Larvotto bay…