Galaxy Entertainment Group management said that the Chinese New Year period was slow to warm up, but that it’s seen “good growth across every segment of the business” during the period and feels “pretty good for the full quarter”.
At its annual results media conference on Thursday, Chief Operating Officer Kevin Kelley echoed statements by Chairman Francis Lui that the first few days of CNY “were a bit soft”.
“Typically it takes the third and fourth day to really start the ramp over the course of the next six to seven days. And this is exactly what we’ve seen,” stated the executive.
Aside from full hotel occupancy, Kelley highlighted that across “VIP, our super premium, premium, mass and electronic gaming – all of those segments have seen some pretty robust growth on a yearly basis. This year has been very, very good for us thus far”.
Chairman Francis Lui highlighted that “the coming weekend is also very important”, aiming to continue the high hotel occupancy rate, and that “we are confident that for the coming week we will continue to perform well”.
While Kelley noted that the historical tendency is for a fall-off after the CNY period and “obviously we’re going to be a little bit softer, but it’s all relative. We’ll probably run in the low 90s (occupancy) instead of the high 90s, but I think as we look into March, we have a pretty good robust calendar of things for our customers – reasons to come back.”
The group’s COO noted that over CNY, aside from gaming and hotel occupancy, “our food and beverage has achieved record results in terms of covers and revenue. We’re seeing some good robust lift in our luxury retail shopping”.
