Former Microsoft Guru Joins Space Race

Business Day – December 13, 2007
By Chris van Gass

CAPE TOWN — SpacePortEdutainment, a company with strong South African ties, has raised eyebrows in the business community with the scale and ambition of several offshore projects it is planning, including a € 500m theme park, hotel and casino complex in Spain.

Local businessman Danny Naidoo, the former Microsoft SA developer and platform group director who is president and CEO of SpacePort, said yesterday the company’s plans for a similar $330m theme park in the north-eastern Chinese city of Shenyang were at an advanced stage and that it was “fully funded”.

He said the name of the Singapore-based investor was still confidential and would be made known later, but the project was a joint venture between the Shenyang government, the investor and SpacePort.

Naidoo also said he was in talks to find backers for the Spanish project in which the company had been awarded two of the 32 casino licences.

He said the UK-based International Leisure Development investment group had negotiated a Las Vegas-style development with the Spanish government and the regional government of Aragón for permission to build five theme parks, as well as 32 hotels and casinos in the Los Monegros desert on the border between Huesca and Zaragoza provinces.

Naidoo said SpacePort had several other such theme park projects planned in the Europe-Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Africa regions.

Naidoo said the company , based in Cape Town, had been developing the SpacePort concept since 2002 and was now fast-tracking its commercialisation, based on a “viable KPMG business plan”.

It had established a global network of experts who would contribute to making the concept a success. SpacePort would market itself using the media, virtual reality, and software for digital elements, using the internet as its “bind”. Hi -tech 4-D animated simulation rides and other proprietary special effects content would be developed in Cape Town, taking advantage of the well-established film and information and communications technology sectors.

He said so far the principals involved in SpacePort had invested about R10m on developing the business plan for the venture and he expected a further R16m to be spent on “mobilising” the projects.

“I’m not here to do things in order to prove sceptics wrong, I’m doing things because I know there’s a business model here,” Naidoo said.

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