By Chang Huang-
The Casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) in Macau, China, enjoyed a sharp rise by 22.6 percent year-on-year in November, to MOP23.03 billion (US$2.86 billion), data released on Friday by the city’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau reveals.
The casino also known by its Portuguese-language acronym DICJ, is jubilating in their recent boost in revenues.
On Monday several brokerages covering the Macau casino sector issued notes in anticipation of at least 18 percent year-on-year GGR growth.
The November GGR result marked the 16th consecutive month of year-on-year GGR growth in the market.
Macau market’s tally for the first 11 months of 2017 stands at MOP243.04 billion, up 19.5 percent from the prior-year period, according to the official data. GGR for the first 11 months of 2017 has already beaten the figure recorded for 2016, when the city’s casinos recorded an aggregate GGR of MOP223.2 billion.
Analysts DS Kim and Sean Zhuang of JP Morgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Ltd, said in a Friday described the profit in the MOP768 million (US$95.5 million) average daily revenue implied by the November result, as the “best non-holiday” daily performance “in three years, only topped by this year’s October Golden Week and Chinese New Year demand.”
The institution said the sharply increased revenues represented the fifth consecutive month that Macau GGR had beaten market expectation.
Brokerage Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd happily described the November tally as “wildly ahead of expectations”. Analysts Vitaly Umansky, Zhen Gong and Cathy Huang, .said in a statement to THE EYE OF MEDIA.COM
“We continue to voice caution about the strength (and volatility) surrounding VIP,” stated analysts Vitaly Umansky, Zhen Gong and Cathy Huang, referring to the high roller segment.
“High hold rates in VIP along with continued volume strength creates volatility and lack of ability to more accurately forecast the monthly trend,” they added.
Grant Govertsen, analyst at Union Gaming Securities Asia Ltd, hailed his pool of gaming customers, as he showed off the range of their range of quality visitors. He told THE EYE OF MEDIA.COM
“As we’ve noted previously, Macau continues to see a better quality gaming customer even as the headline official visitation rate suggests only modest growth. In other words, lower-quality visitors are generally being replaced by higher-quality visitors,” he said, in reference to “a greater number of hotel rooms available to marketing teams that can then be allocated to high quality players”.
Quality visitors are those who spend money on the gambling machines of casinos, adding to the wide array of loyal gamblers every casino likes to have. Many punters strike lucky and multiply their money in casinos, as they celebrate their success by buying friends a fellow punters a round of drinks. Many more punters are not as fortunate, and individually or together loose thousands, gambling for the chance of making more money by a game of chance.
The eventual winners are the casino executives whose bank balances are often very healthy compared to those who squander their money for those lucky ones who win to gain.
Earnings at Macau’s six biggest casino operators dropped by 40 per cent in 2015 following a heavy crackdown by Chinese president Xi Jinping’s corruption in the only part of China where gambling is legal. The leading casinos reported combined first-half earnings of over $3bn before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation( spreading of expenses for intangible assets during a specific period)down from just over $5bn in the same period last year.
Annual gaming revenue enjoyed a decade of rapid growth before falling for the firs in Macau for the first time in 2014 as the Chinese high-rollers who had been driving growth in the former Portuguese territory took fright at Beijing’s anti-graft measures. The gaming Casinos opened more than $20bn worth of new casinos and entertainment facilities between 2015 and 2017, arriving at this point of high revenues. Gala