Macau casino gaming revenue declined for the 18th straight month in November. This comes despite the much ballyhooed opening of Melco Crown’s Studio City resort in October.
Hope was high in Macau that November’s revenue figure would be the first proper indication of the impact of the Hollywood-themed resort. Those hopes were dashed when the Gaming Inspection and Coordination numbers were released Tuesday as gross gaming revenue fell 32.3% year-on-year to MOP 16.4 billion.
The figure was the lowest monthly GGR recorded since 2010, said DICJ, sinking to near five-year lows.
This marks the 18th consecutive month of declines triggered by Beijing’s corruption crackdown and China’s slowing economy. Beijing continues to urge casino operators to diversify their revenue streams by changing their focus away from VIPs to the mass-gaming market and rebranding the city’s image to a more family-friendly destination.
Professor of gaming studies and research at the Macau Polytechnic Institute Zhonglu Zeng told Macau Business Daily that the gambling market will gradually get used to negative factors, adding that he expects quarter-on-quarter improvement moving forward.
ECONOMIC DECLINE EASES A BIT
According to the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC), Macau’s GDP shrank 24.2% year-on-year for the three months through September, easing from the 26.4% drop in the second quarter but nonetheless marking the fifth consecutive quarterly decline.
The third quarter’s economic contraction, said DSEC in a statement, was attributable to the continuous decline in services exports, of which gaming plunged 37.4% and other tourism services fell 15.3%.
The figure is in line with city’s GGR in the third quarter, which fell 34.4% year-on-year.
The accumulated GGR for the first 11 months of the year is down 35.3% year-on-year to MOP 212.5 billion.
