Macau experiences gambling revenue rise

The world’s biggest casino hub reported a 3.1 percent rise last month.

Macau.- Macau’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau posted January’s gross gaming revenue’s results, where the industry grew 3.1 percent to US$2.4 million. The numbers are significantly better than the ones reported a year before, when revenues fell 21.4 percent.

Despite the good results, analysts expected higher incomes: “This was considerably lower than consensus of +8.5% (range of +5% to +12%). We would expect the Macau names to be weak on this print, especially the names with greater exposure to VIP. The results are especially disappointing given what appeared to be a very strong start to the month,” said Grant Govertsen, Union Gaming analyst. According to Investment bank Sanford Bernstein, the casino industry increased its revenues 10–12 percent in the first week of the year, in comparison with the same period of 2016.

Despite reports predicting that the last two weeks of the month would be better in numbers, Goversten believes that the placement of the Chinese New Year (CNY) didn’t help the industry: “CNY began on January 28th (Saturday) this year vs. February 8th (Monday) last year. Therefore, January 2017 felt the full negative impact of the traditional pre-CNY seasonal slowdown. Given the positive trends over the last few months we were hopeful that the traditional slowdown would be somewhat mitigated. This was obviously not the case.”