GGRAsia – Feb on track for 10 pct GGR growth in Macau: analysts

Feb on track for 10 pct GGR growth in Macau: analysts

Feb 21, 2017 Newsdesk Latest News, Macau, Top of the deck

Macau casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) for February is on track to expand by 10 to 11 percent year-on-year, say several brokerages.

They base their forecast on unofficial returns from the industry, covering the period February 1 to 19 inclusive.

Hong Kong-based Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd said its own channel checks indicate that Macau’s GGR in the first 19 days of February was about MOP16.3 billion (US$2.04 billion), indicating an average daily rate of MOP858 million. “Last week’s (February 13 – 19) implied ADR was [about] MOP614 million, slightly lower than expected,” analysts Vitaly Umansky, Zhen Gong and Yang Xie stated in a Monday note.

The Sanford Bernstein team estimates an average daily rate for casino GGR of between MOP580 million and MOP600 million for the remainder of this month, implying February GGR in the range of MOP21.5 billion to MOP 21.7 billion, or +10 percent to +11 percent year-on-year, “slightly higher than previous estimates”.

Referring to last year being a leap year, the Sanford C. Bernstein team said: “Note that February 2017 has one day less compared with 2016 and that the same period VIP luck factor last year was high.”

The brokerage added that – compared with January’s average daily rate of MOP621 million for the Macau market – the month-to-date average daily rate of MOP858 million was up 38 percent.

Japanese brokerage Nomura said in a Monday note that February was “still on track” for 10 percent growth judged year-on-year, versus its earlier estimate of 9 percent.

“Gross gaming revenue during 13 to 19 February came in at MOP4.3 billion, which implies an average daily GGR of MOP614 million and a week-on-week decline of 25 percent,” said Nomura.