“May Golden Week was surprisingly golden” in terms of gross gaming revenue (GGR), said JP Morgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Ltd, referring to Macau casino market performance during a five-day mainland China holiday that concluded on Sunday (May 5).
“Based on our checks, GGR for the first five days of May was MOP4.55 billion [US$565.1 million], or a MOP910 million per day run-rate,” wrote analysts DS Kim, Selina Li, and Mufan Shi in a Monday note.
Though they counselled it didn’t necessarily mean the strong early result would translate to the whole of May.
“We would caution simply extrapolating the trend for the rest of month/quarter, given usual and inevitable margins of error in these weekly checks,” the analysts stated.
CLSA Ltd had mentioned in a Friday memo, that May GGR might grow by 6 percent month-on-month, though the institution’s expectation was still below the market’s 7 percent, it observed.
Nonetheless, JP Morgan said the May holidays GGR performance had been “a pleasant surprise, beating estimates by +5 percent to +10 percent, despite rainfall and floods in Hong Kong and South China”.
An aggregate of 604,395 visitors – or just over 120,000 daily – entered Macau between May 1 and May 5 inclusive. That was about 8 percent below the 130,000 daily that had been forecast by the Macao Government Tourism Office.
While visitor volume is not necessarily a proxy for GGR performance, JP Morgan said the “quality/mix of gamblers turned out to be much stronger than expected,” despite the “pretty underwhelming” visitor volume.
Visitor numbers during the May holiday period had been 84 percent of pre-Covid level, and “well below” the circa 100 percent recovery during 2024 Chinese New Year relative to that festive period in 2019, stated the brokerage.
For the first five days of May, JP Morgan assessed that mass GGR had recovered to “approximately 120 percent” of the pre-Covid level, versus VIP GGR at “approximately 30 percent” of pre-Covid, “implying about 5 percentage points faster recovery than recent trends”.
