GGRAsia – Macau mass GGR at pre-Covid levels in GW: JP Morgan

Macau mass GGR at pre-Covid levels in GW: JP Morgan

Oct 06, 2023 Newsdesk Latest News, Macau, Top of the deck

JP Morgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Ltd says the recovery in the number of visitors arrivals to Macau during the October Golden Week (GW) has helped push mass-market gross gaming revenues (GGR) to over “100 percent” versus 2019 levels, before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“So far things appear pretty in-line with our expectations of 100-percent-plus recovery in mass GGR (versus 2019 Golden Week),” wrote analysts DS Kim, Mufan Shi and Selina Li in a Thursday memo.

“We said a buy-side bar for upcoming GGR print would be at circa MOP750 million [US$93.0 million] a day – equal to MOP850 million for six [days of the] holidays, plus MOP450 million in two slow days – versus MOP640 million a day in 2023 May Day [holiday break], with MOP850 million a day to be considered as a meaningful ‘beat’,” they added.

On Thursday, Macau welcomed 91,145 visitors on what was the seventh day of the October Golden Week, according to preliminary figures from the city’s Public Security Police. That took the tally of visitors during the first seven days of the holiday period to nearly 860,000.

China’s State Council has designated September 29 to October 6 inclusive this year as the holiday period popularly known as either autumn or October Golden Week. This year, the period encompasses the lunar-calendar based Mid-Autumn Festival, which fell on September 29, and China’s National Day on October 1.

In Thursday’s memo, JP Morgan noted that the number of visitors on Wednesday – the sixth day of the holiday break – stood at nearly 114,000, “reaching 90-percent-plus of the 2019 Golden Week, versus 84 percent recovery in the first five days” of this year’s Golden Week.

“The pace of mainland visitor recovery ramped up sharply on day six, printing 110 percent of 2019’s Golden Week versus 75 percent in the first five days,” stated the JP Morgan analysts.

The brokerage expects the number of visitor arrivals during the Golden Week period to recover to above 85 percent of 2019 levels, with the number of mainland tourists “hitting 80 to 85 percent”.