Macau Casinos Up 17.6% To $3.88bn In August

Macau’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau has just released its casino figures for August, revealing a 17.6% increase in revenue to 30.7 billion patacas ($3.88 billion) compared to the same month in 2012.
The Chinese enclave of Macau’s latest revenue figure represents the second strongest monthly tally this year, and was also in line with analysts’ predictions who forecast growth in the world’s biggest gambling market of between 17% and 19%.
Despite a slowdown in the Chinese economy, for the first eight months of this year Macau’s gross gaming revenue is now up by 16.2% to MOP231.67 billion (US$29 billion), and experts remain confident of continuing growth in Macau’s gambling industry, pointing to strong consumer sentiment and low penetration among China’s huge population as determining factors.
In another positive sign, the gambling resort has started noticing an  increase in the numbers of “mass market” spenders compared to VIP spenders, who typically account for around 70% of Macau’s total gambling revenue. By encouraging growth in the number of its upper-middle class visitors, Macau will be hoping to achieve more stable revenue than relying predominantly on just super-rich gamblers.
Back in 2007, Macau overtook the Las Vegas Strip to become the world’s largest gambling market and by 2011 it was generating more than five times the revenue of its US competitor. Macau’s achievements are even more impressive when one considers that in 2002 revenue on the Las Vegas Strip totalled $5.3 billion compared to $2.77 billion for Macau.
Looking to the future, Aaron Fischer, an analyst at CLSA, said: “At the heart of Macao’s phenomenal growth was the Chinese people’s penchant for games of fortune. Revenues in the city’s casinos could eventually exceed the whole of the US market, which currently yields $60 billion in a year.”