Despite Macau’s casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) in the opening quarter of 2025 being “behind pace” on the government’s goal, “there is a path for total GGR to reach Macau’s 2025 target,” said CreditSights Inc in a Friday memo.
Macau’s aggregate casino GGR in the first quarter of 2025 totalled MOP57.66 billion (US$7.21 billion), up 0.6 percent from a year earlier, according to official data. It represented 24.0 percent of the Macau government’s MOP240 billion forecast for this year, or MOP20 billion a month.
Macau’s Secretary for Economy and Finance, Tai Kin Ip, expressed earlier this month the possibility that the GGR forecast for this might not be met.
“For now, we still think there is a path for total GGR to reach Macau’s 2025 target, as further visitation recovery can offset stalling GGR per visitor,” wrote analysts Nicholas Chen and David Bussey.
“Assuming GGR per visitor falls by a modest 3 percent year-on-year in 2025 – i.e., circa MOP6,300 – total visitor arrivals for the year would need to be around 38.1 million or 97 percent of pre-Covid levels,” they added.
“While this still appears within reach based on the data thus far, we admittedly see a more challenging path given tariff-related uncertainties,” stated the CreditSights team, referring to the U.S.-China tariff row.
Earlier this month, U.S. President Donald Trump raised to a minimum of 145 percent the U.S. tariff on imports from China. Beijing raised its own tariffs on U.S. goods to 125 percent.
On Tuesday, Mr Trump said U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports would come down “substantially” from the current rate of 145 percent, but did not mention a figure.
According to CreditSights, GGR per visitor to Macau in Macau fell by 11 percent year-on-year to MOP6,406, “which suggests a larger proportion of lower-spending casino-goers – i.e., more visitors from less affluent areas of the mainland – and/or more non-gaming visitors within the visitor mix during the month”.
“This could also reflect a less favourable year-on-year hold-rate,” added the analysts.
“Nevertheless, there was a slight 2 percent sequential improvement from February 2025 (MOP6,274),” they added. “We think that the recovery of GGR per visitor remains constrained given that we expect visitation upside to largely come from Chinese provinces with lower GDP [gross domestic product] per capita.”
In March, Macau received just under 3.07 million, 12.8-percent higher than a year earlier, according to information released by the city’s Statistics and Census Service. The data showed that arrivals in the first quarter of 2025 increased by 11.1 percent from the prior-year period, to just above 9.86 million.
The institution said the figure for GGR per visitor was “only a proxy for gaming spending per capita, as the latter figure is not disclosed specifically”.
