Due to the current prevalence of the mass market in the Macau SAR, gross gaming revenue (GGR) values will now have a more sustainable growth that correlates to any increase in its visitor volume, gaming researcher Davis Fong pointed out.
The director of the Institute for the Study of Commercial Gaming and a professor at the University of Macau was one of the guests on a panel on the first year of the new gaming concessions, organized by the Rui Cunha Foundation.
“I tried to calculate the average mass market between 2019 and 2023. If you look at the number of visitors and the number of mass market, basically each player lost MOP15,000 ($1,861). In Las Vegas that average is about $300 per gambler. That means our mass market has a much higher betting average than the mass market in Las Vegas,” Fong pointed out.
In pre-pandemic times, the city casino sector generated about MOP292 billion ($36.2 billion), while receiving some 39 million visitors.
However, in 2023 the city welcomed about 28.23 million visitors in 2023, with the total gaming tally for the year, with casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) for calendar year 2023 stood at MOP183.06 billion ($22.75 billion).
With the city’s revenue made up now at about 80 percent being mass market and 20 percent being the VIP sector, a drastic shift from previous years, Fong pointed out changes in the SAR GGR would be easier to calculate.
According to the researcher, if one was to pick the fourth quarter of 2023, add all the GGR, and divide it by three, this would represent around MOP18 billion ($2.2 billion) per month, and if one was to take the GGR of all year and divide it by the number of tourists it will be around MOP6,400 ($794) per visitor.
“This was a very very stable number, and means that after one year of the new gaming model we understand that if we can keep growing the number of tourists, we can expect that about the same ratio of GGR will come back. So if we increase the number of visitors by 20 percent in 2024, there will be about a 20 percent rise in GGR,” he concluded.
The former legislator also pointed out the need for the sector to evaluate what would be the most effective synergies between gaming and non-gaming, in line with government efforts to expand the percentage of non-gaming economic input.
“Some concerts increased mass market GGR by 30 to 40 percent in some IRs. We need to evaluate which are the best synergies,” he added.
