Macau casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) rose 6 percent sequentially in the seven-day period ended July 18 versus the first 11 days of the month, estimated a Monday memo from brokerage Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd.
The institution added that the month-to-date average daily GGR this month was up one third compared to June.
The brokerage said in the update that its channel checks indicated that Macau’s GGR for July 1 to July 18 was MOP5.2 billion (about US$650 million), with a month-to-date average daily rate of MOP288 million.
The latter tally was down 63 percent compared to July 2019, i.e., pre-pandemic, when the average daily rate was MOP789 million.
Macau GGR already had risen by 16 percent sequentially in the first 11 days of July, versus the final 10 days of June, according to a prior note from Sanford Bernstein.
In its latest memo, the brokerage said it forecast full-July GGR to be down about 60 percent compared to July 2019, but up 40 percent compared with the previous month.
The Sanford Bernstein team noted that the GGR upward trend was related to a recovery in visitor volume due to the removal of Covid-19-related “additional quarantine requirements for Guangdong visitors” heading to Macau.
“July’s GGR improvement was contributed by continuous visitation recovery from Guangdong ([Macau’s] largest feeder market), which has no new local Covid-19 cases since June 22,” said analysts Vitaly Umansky, Louis Li and Kelsey Zhu.
The Macau authorities eased starting July 10 the Covid-19 test rules for those seeking quarantine-free travel from the neighbouring Guangdong province. Under the new regulations, any Covid-19 test certificate issued within seven days of arrival in Macau is now considered valid for purposes of entering the city, rather than the people needing a certificate issued within 48 hours of arrival, the previous requirement.
Fresh cases of Covid-19 infection in Guangdong had been reported since late May, and as a result on June 8, the Macau government introduced the 48-hour test rule.
The Macau authorities also increased in June the number of mainland communities in Guangdong where residents would be subject to 14-day quarantine on arrival in Macau. It was only on the evening of July 7 that the last of a number of Guangdong communities was removed from a 14-day-quarantine-on-arrival list.
