As reported by Inside Asian Gaming, gaming income across Macau is predicted to recuperate 100% over the coming holiday period, approaching the levels seen during the October Golden Week that took place in 2019. Additionally, that should be enough to give the city’s firms “a month to forget.”
The prediction:
JP Morgan, an investment bank, revealed the aforementioned prediction on September 18, following a recommendation by channel checks that total gross gaming revenue (GGR) during the first 17 days of September came to MOP$8.1 billion or MOP$476 million a day. In this regard, analysts Selina Li, DS Kim and Mufan Shi said: “This implies a run-rate of between MOP$540 million and MOP$550 million per day over the past week compared with MOP$430 million during the first few weeks of the month when extreme weather events severely impacted the industry.”
As expectations are now high for the said Golden Week, analysts commented that they expect the appearance and cash flow to reach consensus with traffic recuperation to 85% of the level of the particular Golden Week 2019 and massive gross gaming income to return to 100%. However, in an individual note, JP Morgan said: “Most investors will be satisfied if visitation recovery hits 85%+ of pre-COVID levels, and our checks and recent visitation trends suggest there is little downside risk here.”
The inflow of tourists per day during August is responsible for the increase in profits:
Since Macau’s GGR has grown every month looking at the first 8 month of 2023, with new post-covid revenues peaking in August at MOP$17.21 billion, the main reason for this is tourists, hence the importance of the the aforementioned October Golden Week, a mid-fall festival celebrated according to the lunar calendar. This year it starts on September 29 and lasts until October 6, including China’s National Day on October 1. Those holidays weeks are important because they attract an influx of tourists to Macau, which further benefits to the casinos and other tourism establishments, as mentioned above.
As for tourists visits in August, more than 100,000 tourists visited Macau during the first half of August per day, surpassing government’s assumptions, according to what the director of the Macao Government Tourism Office, Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, said in a statement to local media in late August. Moreover, the city’s Statistics and Census Service provided data on tourist visits for July, where it can be seen that during the mentioned month the number of tourists per day was 89,000, that is, almost 2.76 million for the whole month.