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Global brokerage has reportedly lowered the enclave’s 2021 aggregated gross gaming revenues forecast owing to concerns connected to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Morgan Stanley banking group has cut by 19 percent its estimate for Macau market casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) generated this year.
The bank said its downward revision was due to “continued delay” in easing of travel rules relating to movement between Hong Kong and Macau, and between mainland China and those places.
“Despite a reduction in new Covid-19 cases in Asia, the conditions to open,” travel, “without many restrictions, are more onerous,” wrote analysts Praveen Choudhary, Gareth Leung and Thomas Allen.
The banking group now thinks Macau’s 2021 GGR will be just under MOP130.19 billion (US$16.3 billion), which would still be up 115.4 percent year-on-year on the MOP60.44 billion achieved in 2020, when disruption to inbound tourism due to the Covid-19 pandemic was at a height.
The average nightly occupancy rate for Macau hotels – including properties in casino resorts – could reach “70 percent to 80 percent” during the upcoming Labour Day break in May, indicated a Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO) senior official on Tuesday, citing the latest hotel room booking data from the industry.
The holiday season encompassing Labour Day on May 1 was likely to “emerge as the best” for the Macau tourism “since the pandemic” started, early last year, said MGTO deputy director Cheng Wai Tong, in comments to the local media on the sidelines of a Tuesday event.
The latest forecast on average nightly occupancy for the Labour Day break is higher than that previously mentioned by a fellow MGTO official on Friday. That person said hotels might be “40 percent to 50 percent” full during the holiday period.
Banking group Morgan Stanley expects Macau casino industry earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) to have fallen sequentially in the first quarter, despite an increase in gross gaming revenue (GGR) in the period.
The Macau industry was likely to report in the upcoming earnings season total “corporate EBITDA of US$181 million” for the first quarter of 2021, wrote analysts Praveen Choudhary, Gareth Leung and Thomas Allen, in a Sunday memo.
“This is 23-percent lower than fourth-quarter 2020 due to seasonality (weaker retail, hotel, and food and beverage revenues sequentially) and higher operating expense quarter-on-quarter as a result of uneven recovery in first-quarter 2021,” they added.