GGRAsia – Bernstein ups its Macau October casino GGR outlook

Bernstein ups its Macau October casino GGR outlook

Oct 22, 2019 Newsdesk Latest News, Macau, Top of the deck

Brokerage Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd says it is revising upward its forecast for Macau’s October casino gross gaming revenue (GGR). The institution now thinks such market-wide revenue will be in the range of down 3 percent to flat judged year-on-year, compared to its previous estimate of -6 percent to -3 percent performance.

“There could be potential upside to our estimate if VIP hold rate stays above normal range,” stated analysts Vitaly Umansky, Eunice Lee and Kelsey Zhu in a Monday note, referring to the performance of the house versus high-roller players.

The institution said its “channel checks” suggested Macau GGR for October 1 to 20 was approximately MOP18.6 billion (US$2.3 billion) – a month-to-date average daily rate of MOP930 million.

Sanford Bernstein said the latter average daily rate number was 5 percent up year-on-year, and 26 percent up sequentially compared with September 2019.

Brokerage Nomura said in a Monday note that it estimated for the prior week that average daily mass-market gambling revenues were up by 13 percent to 14 percent year-on-year; and that VIP hold percentage for that week was 3.3 percent to 3.4 percent, versus a “normalised” hold range of 2.7 percent to 3.0 percent.

Nomura calculated that VIP gambling volume was tracking approximately 20 percent lower last week versus the same period last year.

Macau’s October GGR “should settle around MOP27 billion,” stated analysts Harry Curtis, Daniel Adam and Brian Dobson.

“Our roughly flat GGR growth estimate for October is not a major deviation from last month’s 0.6 percent year-on-year lift,” they added.