GGRAsia – Sept daily Macau GGR rebounds after storms: brokerage

Sept daily Macau GGR rebounds after storms: brokerage

Sep 18, 2023 Newsdesk Latest News, Macau, Top of the deck

Macau’s September daily run rate for casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) improved by at least 25.6 percent relative to the first two weeks of the month, when inbound tourism was disrupted by bad weather, estimated JP Morgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Ltd in a Monday note.

The institution calculated GGR for the first 17 days of September at MOP8.1 billion (US$1.04 billion), or MOP476 million per day.

“This implies that last week’s run rate bounced back to MOP540 million to MOP550 million per day versus MOP430 million during the first two weeks of September, as the (very) bad weather eased,” wrote analysts DS Kim, Mufan Shi, and Selina Li.

Nonetheless, the institution said September was likely to be “a month to forget”.

“However, we believe the market will likely look through this print (which was dragged by extreme weather), and all eyes will be on Golden Week anyway by the time the September GGR is out,” it added.

In a separate Monday note, JP Morgan identified several points of caution when it came time to analyse data from the upcoming autumn ‘Golden Week’ holidays for China, typically a busy period for Macau tourism and for casino business.

“It won’t… be easy to make an apples-to-apples comparison” with previous years, “as this year’s holiday actually starts from September for eight days: September 29 to October 6, versus a seven-day holiday in October 2019”. This was due in 2023 to an “overlap” between October’s fixed-date festivities for National Day, and the lunar calendar-based Mid-Autumn Festival at the end of September, observed JP Morgan.

The institution also mentioned that what it termed “quality” of players coming to Macau in the autumn Golden Week was likely to be a more important driver of the city’s GGR than headline visitor numbers.

Last week Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) stated it expected the city to record a daily average of “over 100,000” visitor arrivals during this year’s festive period.

JP Morgan expects Golden Week visitor volume to be comparable to the pre-pandemic trading period of 2019, when Macau received a total of 985,000 visitors over a seven-day holiday, “averaging at 141,000 per day with a peak of 164,000 on day three,” stated the brokerage.

“We sense that most investors will be satisfied if visitation recovery” for autumn Golden Week this time,“hits 85 percent plus, of pre-Covid levels,” added the team of analysts.

Most buy-side brokers were expecting “100 percent-plus recovery in mass” GGR, relative to pre-pandemic performance, i.e., to circa “MOP650 million to MOP700 million per day,” and “approximately 30 percent recovery in VIP,” to “MOP135 million to MOP150 million” daily, putting the daily run rate in the range of “MOP800 million to MOP850 million”.

JP Morgan further noted: “This means the Golden Week GGR print from consultants should hit around MOP6 billion for the first eight days of October.”