The daily run-rate of Macau’s casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) for May 1 to 5 – a five-day mainland China holiday period surrounding Labour Day and also known as “May Golden Week” – was estimated at MOP1.02 billion (US$127.5 million) by JP Morgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Ltd in a memo issued on Tuesday, citing its channel checks.
The figure “significantly exceeds buy-side expectations for May Golden Week, which we believe to be around MOP850 million per day, i.e., around a 15-percent to 20-percent beat, which would mark the biggest beat we’ve seen in years,” noted the JP Morgan team.
May 1 and May 5 were also public holidays in Hong Kong, Macau’s second most important market for inbound visitors.
“Based on our checks, GGR for the first five days of May was MOP5.1 billion,” said analysts DS Kim and Selina Li.
They added: “This represents a strong 12-percent year-on-year growth, despite facing a tough comparison base, and [is] 90-percent-plus of pre-Covid May Golden Week [levels] despite the demise of VIP [play].”
Macau received approximately 850,000 visitors during the May holidays this time.
A total of 679,000 arrivals were from mainland China, 111,000 from Hong Kong, 9,100 from Taiwan, and 51,000 from international markets, according to a press release from the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) on Tuesday.
JP Morgan said the overall visitor arrival performance for May Golden Week was “equally – if not more – impressive” than the GGR performance for the same period. The daily average for the May break was up almost 41 percent year-on-year to approximately 170,000 visitor arrivals per day, “marking an all-time high for May Golden Week and surpassing 2019’s by 7 percent,” the institution wrote.
The average hotel occupancy rate during the latest festivities stood at around 94.1 percent, an increase of 5.0 percentage points compared to the same holiday period last year, said MGTO. The highest daily occupancy rate was recorded on May 2, reaching 98.1 percent.
