The Macau government is setting an ambitious goal of having 85 percent of middle and upper-level management positions in the city’s casino industry be filled with local workers by 2020.
Macau presented the final version of the city’s first Five-Year Development Plan on Thursday, which includes social and economic aspirations for the city, and covers the period 2016 to 2020. The plan is different and separate from China’s national 13th Five-Year Plan.
GGRAsia reported that Macau is targeting to increase the number of local executives in the city’s casino by 85 percent in 2020. The former Portuguese enclave’s number of locals working in middle and upper level casino position stands at 81.9 percent in 2015.
According to government statistics, Macau’s overall population in the second quarter includes at least 28 percent foreign workers.
Aside from increasing the number of local executives in its casino industry, the Macau government vowed to reduce the proportion of gaming workers without higher education from 80 percent in 2015 to 76 percent in 2016.
On the other hand, Macau’s Five-Year Development Plan does not “aim to expand the size of the gaming industry, but target instead for it to achieve higher intrinsic quality.”
“We have concluded that gaming revenues are not that low and we hope that the double-digit negative growth can be turned into a positive growth,” Macau’s chief executive, Fernando Chui Sai On said, according to the gaming news website.
Government officials will beef up its regulations covering the gaming industry in the next five years in response to the findings stated in Macau government’s “mid-term” review report of the local casino industry in May. While the findings were mostly quantitative, the document failed to include criticism on rules for the junket sector.
As for the non-gaming revenue at Macau casino resorts, the Macau government aims for non-gaming – including hospitality, retailing, food and beverage, and entertainment – to account on average market-wide for at least 9 percent of all such revenue by 2020, from what the government estimates was 6.6 percent in 2014.
