Macau Casino Revenue Up 21% To $3.63bn In September

The world’s biggest gambling market, Macau, has just released its casino results for September revealing a 21% increase in revenue to 28.96 billion patacas ($3.63 billion) compared to the $3 billion taken in the same month last year.
Despite the growth rate being slightly lower than the 22 to 25 percent increase anticipated by analysts, the figure was nonetheless impressive considering a severe typhoon struck close to Macau on September 22, causing disruptions to transport links on and off the island, and resulting in a lower number of visitors to the gambling hub.
Looking ahead to next month, however, analysts are predicting a record-shattering October as tourists from all over China are expected to flock to Macau to celebrate the Golden Week Holiday. In fact, many of the resort’s hotels are already fully booked for the entire period leading analysts to believe that Macau’s gross revenue could hit 32 billion patacas in October, which would be more than the current record of 31.3 billion patacas set in March of this year.
So far this year, Macau’s total gross gaming revenue has now exceeded 260.6 billion patacas, a number that represents a 16.7% improvement over the first nine months of 2012. Furthermore, the government is also actively trying to improve on the 28 million tourists who visited Macau last year by further developing Macau’s local infrastructure, with future projects including completing a bridge connecting Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macau by 2016.
Up until now, increasing gridlock on Macau’s streets has remained a sore point amongst visitors, and as CLSA analyst Aaron Fischer, explains: “Visitor growth in Macau historically has underperformed that of Hong Kong due to the infrastructure bottleneck and the lack of hotel rooms. Those constraints are likely to be alleviated in the next few years with the various infrastructure improvements, which should drive a recovery in Macau’s tourist arrival growth.”