Casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) in Macau rose by 79.1 percent year-on-year in February to MOP18.49 billion (US$2.29 billion), according to data released on Friday by the city’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau. The result was however down 4.4 percent from January.
February’s GGR result was down sequentially despite what had been described by investment analysts as a “strong performance” during the Chinese New Year holiday period, which ran from February 10 to 17 inclusive.
JP Morgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Ltd said in a Friday note that the latest data was “falling shy” of the market’s “elevated expectations”, with player demand post- February 17, weaker than expected.
February gaming revenue “came in a tad lighter than the (elevated) consensus of MOP19 billion to MOP20 billion,” that had been anticipated, “as post- lunar new year demand seems to have slowed down a bit more than what we would have liked to see,” wrote analysts DS Kim, Mufan Shi and Selina Li.
The brokerage had said in a February 19 note that “daily GGR for the peak lunar new year holidays” on day four to day seven, was likely to have “hit the MOP1 billion-plus mark for the first time in over four years, coming in above MOP900-million-plus run-rates during last Golden Week in October”.
The latest data for the whole of February took Macau’s GGR for the first two months of 2024 to nearly MOP37.82 billion, up 72.7 percent from the prior-year period.
(Updated 4.08pm March 1)
