Macau’s MOP19.66-billion (US$2.45-billion) in casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) in March “wasn’t bad at all,” said brokerage JP Morgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Ltd in a Tuesday memo.
Casino GGR in Macau rose 0.8 percent year-on-year in March, but it was down 0.4 percent sequentially, according to official data.
March GGR in the Macau market was “1 percent above JP Morgan estimates [and market] consensus of flat growth,” wrote analysts DS Kim, Selina Li, and Mufan Shi.
“This implies MOP634 million per day,” stated the JP Morgan team, adding that the trend was “similar” to the run rate observed in the first two months of 2025. The March tally was “pretty respectable despite being a seasonally slow month”.
According to the brokerage, casino GGR in the first quarter of 2025 “was stable year-on-year and quarter-on-quarter” at MOP57.66 billion, up 0.6 percent on the same period in 2024.
“On a daily run-rate basis, this implies modest growth, 2 percent year-on-year and 3 percent quarter-on-quarter, to hit the highest run-rate in 20-plus quarters,” stated JP Morgan.
It added: “This bodes well for growth to improve into second-half 2025, given easier comparisons from June onwards, and we keep our 2025 GGR growth forecast of 3 percent, to be led by 0 to 1 percent [growth] in the first half, versus 5 to 6 percent in the second half.”
Brokerage Seaport Research Partners acknowledged that the GGR tally in March was “weaker than our forecast at the beginning of the month, but slightly beats the Asia sell-side Bloomberg estimate of 0 percent year-on-year”.
“The end of March does not seem to have been materially impacted by the announced law enforcement action against two [alleged] criminal groups engaged in… money movement as the daily GGR average in the last week of the month was not materially different from the first three weeks of March,” noted senior analyst Vitaly Umansky in a Tuesday report.
The analyst said the institution expects April GGR “to be -0.1% year-on-year, -5.8 percent month-on-month”.
“The month-on-month decline is in-line with an historical average of -5.1 percent month-on-month,” said Mr Umansky.
“Our April estimate is slightly impacted by near-term potential headwind from the recent money changers crackdown,” he added.
Nonetheless, Seaport estimates casino GGR to grow by 6.5 percent this year, “with higher growth in the second half of the year, 10.9 percent in the second half and 2.2 percent in the first half”.
On Tuesday, Macau’s Secretary for Economy and Finance, Tai Kin Ip, expressed caution about the city’s public fiscal outlook for 2025, saying that casino GGR this year might fall short of the government’s MOP240-billion target.
Mr Tai observed that the “expected monthly average of MOP20 billion” in GGR was not achieved in the first three months of 2025.
“This year’s fiscal revenue may not be as optimistic as expected,” he said in comments during a seminar hosted by the Macao Chamber of Commerce.
The city levies 40 percent tax on Macau GGR. Last year such tax brought in nearly casino MOP88.13 billion revenue for the public finances.
