Casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) in Macau in September rose 6.0 percent year-on-year, to about MOP18.29 billion (US$2.28 billion), showed data released on Wednesday by the city’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau.
Casino GGR in September fell by 17.5 percent sequentially, as August – at MOP22.16 billion – marked the best monthly performance since January 2020, just before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In late September, the city’s casinos had to suspend temporarily their operations for 33 hours, due to the passage of Super Typhoon Ragasa.
Macau’s weather forecasting service had raised the highest tropical storm warning – Signal No.10 – in the early hours of September 24 as Super Typhoon Ragasa was at its closest to Macau.
The city has five levels of tropical storm warning. They range from 1 (the lowest and least intense) through to 3, 8, 9 and 10 (the highest and most dangerous).
The Macau authorities downgraded the maximum storm signal to Signal No.8 at 4pm on September 24, and lowered it to Signal No.3 at 11pm. The city’s casinos were allowed to resume operations from 2am on Thursday (September 25),
Soon after the event, CLSA Ltd analyst Jeffrey Kiang told GGRAsia that the closure could to have cost the industry about MOP880 million in missed GGR.
Mr Kiang, as well as Ben Lee, managing partner at casino industry adviser IGamiX Management and Consulting Ltd, suggested that the precautionary shutdown was likely to have caused a 5-percent haircut in otherwise-expected September GGR performance.
September’s official GGR tally took the Macau sector’s aggregate so far this year to circa MOP181.34 billion, a 7.1-percent increase from the prior-year period, showed government data.
