JP Morgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Ltd expects Macau to finish the year on a “positive note,” with market-wide gross gaming revenue (GGR) “recovering to circa 80 percent of pre-Covid in December, versus low-70s-of percent in fourth-quarter-to-date”.
The brokerage estimates December GGR in Macau to be in between MOP17.5 billion (US$2.2 billion) and MOP18.0 billion, “thanks to continued ramps in demand and easier comparisons”.
“We believe this will drive fourth-quarter mass GGR to rise over 10 percent quarter-on-quarter, doubling the historical seasonality of plus 5 to 6 percent quarter-on-quarter,” wrote analysts DS Kim, Mufan Shi and Selina Li in a recent note.
Such performance, they added, “will push mass GGR to finally exceed pre-Covid levels and drive EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation] to recover to 85-percent-plus of pre-Covid levels in fourth-quarter 2023, versus 80 percent in the third quarter.”
Macau’s November casino GGR stood at MOP16.04 billion, according to official data. The latest data took Macau’s GGR for the first 11 months of 2023 to just above MO164.49 billion, up 324.9 percent year-on-year.
According to the JP Morgan team’s note, the November GGR tally “was (surprisingly) decent”.
The result indicated that mass GGR last month “stayed at 100 percent of pre-Covid levels … on JP Morgan estimates, which in turn suggests even grind/base mass demand is ramping up to circa 90 percent levels (versus premium mass at 110 to 120 percent of pre-Covid),” stated the analysts.
