Macau’s casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) was estimated at MOP13.3 billion (US$1.65 billion) for the first 24 days of June, or MOP578 million a day, according to a Monday memo from JP Morgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Ltd, citing its own industry checks.
“This implies the last week’s daily run-rate edged down further to MOP514 million a day – versus MOP533 million in the week before – to the lowest level in 6+ months,” wrote JP Morgan’s analysts DS Kim, Mufan Shi and Selina Li.
They added: “We’d like to think this was mostly due to soft seasonality – e.g., post-holiday slowdown, UEFA Euro 2024 [soccer tournament], etc., and June is the seasonally weakest month of the year anyway – and poor VIP win rate (2.6 percent to 2.8 percent versus typical 3-percent+).”
Nonetheless, stated the analysts, last week’s GGR print “was still disappointing as it suggests modest downside risk to our monthly GGR forecast”.
The institution had forecast June’s GGR tally at between MOP17.5 billion and MOP18.0 billion.
By segment for month-to-date, JP Morgan estimates mass-market GGR “at 105-percent+ of the pre-Covid level, while VIP is around low-20s-percent – both in-line with fourth quarter’s run-rate, but weaker than April/May GGR beats”.
May had been a standout month, delivering the best monthly GGR since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020.
“As for second-quarter-to-date, the print suggests GGR is likely to edge down -2 percent to -3 percent quarter-on-quarter, led by -2 percent in mass versus -5 percent in VIP, in-line with our printed forecasts,” stated the JP Morgan team.
