The total premium mass wager in Macau casinos has seen both a sequential and year-on-year growth in August, reflecting robust demand from mainland Chinese players, suggests banking institution Citigroup in its latest monthly floor survey. It also suggested Galaxy Entertainment Group Ltd (GEG) had the market-share lead among the six Macau operators in terms of observed premium mass wager.
Citigroup said the aggregate it saw in premium mass wager for its August survey, amounted to circa HKD12.8 million (US$1.64 million), 35 percent higher than a year ago and also up 4.9 percent from July’s survey.
It said a likely factor was August being a “visitation-strong” month, meaning a higher count of players. In the August survey, Citigroup observed 655 premium mass players, 40 percent higher than a year ago.
“This implies that wager per player in August 2024 fell to HKD19,606 (7 percent lower than July 2024’s HKD21,193).” wrote Citigroup analysts George Choi and Ryan Cheung.
“We think this is just reflecting normal seasonality – the data we gathered from our surveys in 2019 show similar month-on-month decline in wager per player (circa 6 percent),” they noted.
The analysts added: “We believe this seasonal trend is attributable to the fact that the visitation-strong month of August is also a month when the more casual, less keen players show up.”
Out of the 25 “whales” – highest-value players – that Citigroup observed in its latest monthly check, eight were customers of Galaxy Entertainment, Citi noted. The institution defines “whales” as players that have a bet size of HKD100,000 per hand or more.
Citigroup assessed that in terms of wagering observed this month, Galaxy Entertainment had a circa 29-percent share of market-wide premium mass bets, compared to an estimated 25 percent share of premium-mass bets observed in the July survey.
For August, the highest per-hand bet observed for a whale player was HKD600,000 at Dragon Palace, City of Dreams, a property of Melco Resorts & Entertainment Ltd.
Citigroup stated: “The fact that this happens after the Macau government’s decision to criminalise illegal money exchanges within casino premises means that most players, via legitimate channels, are still able to get their funds to the Macau casinos.”
The survey also noted additional deployment of “smart” tables in Macau’s major casino properties.
That included 225 smart tables observed on the ‘grind mass’ floor of Sands China Ltd’s Venetian Macao, compared to just 73 observed in July. The casino premise’s high limit area also now hosts 28 smart tables, Citigroup mentioned.
Its analysts also noted that all tables at the Apex gaming room in Sands China’s Londoner Macao are now “smart”.
At Melco Resorts’ majority-owned Studio City, Citi observed 30 new smart tables placed in the property’s grind mass area.
Melco Resorts will have 215 smart tables deployed at Studio City “by the end of October”; and its flagship property, City of Dreams, is also to have a full rollout of smart tables “by the end of March”, the company’s chairman and chief executive Lawrence Ho Yau Lung mentioned in its second-quarter earnings call.
