From India to Australia, casinos across the Asia Pacific region have closed their doors in response to efforts to combat the spread of the coronavirus, with little to no visibility at present as to the evolution of the situation.
The fast-changing nature of the crisis has left analysts scrambling to find a basis to rewrite their forecasts for the coming quarters, as operators struggle to cut high overheads in the face of collapsing revenue.
In Macau, the casinos remain open, but the borders to the outside world are closed with the territory seeking to prevent reinfection from a series of imported cases. The government has forecast a drop in gross gambling revenue of about 55 percent this year, compared with 2019, although equity analysts are slightly less pessimistic, with Jefferies putting the likely decline at around 45 percent for 2020, before a strong rebound of almost 33 percent next year.
The recovery...
The Kangwon Land Welfare Foundation announced that it provided KRW630 million (US$561,000) for the operation of social welfare facilities and group programs in Gangwon Province as part of the “Welfare Infrastructure Revitalization Project in 2021.”
Paradise Entertainment has issued a press release decrying what it says are fraudulent websites and social media trying to pass themselves off as being related to the company.
In this April edition of Asia Gaming Briefings we take the pulse of how the North Asia jurisdictions of Japan, Korea and the Russian Far East have fared.
The world is bouncing back, or at least coming to grips with the fact that going forward not much will be the same as before. Commendably, this industry quickly understood the need to adapt to a new normal, and that the days of targeting the low hanging fruit of the VIP sector are gone.
Over the years, many of the answers have been remarkably prescient in their forecasts for the near-term direction of Asia’s gaming industry. However, we can safely say that no one came anywhere close to guessing what 2020 may have had in store.
