Macau Business Daily – Gaming bosses seem confident that growth in Macau’s casino revenue will be somewhere in the middle of the range of 10 percent to 20 percent next year because mainlanders will keep coming here to gamble. The chief executive of SJM Holdings Ltd, Ambrose So Shu Fai, expects casino gross gaming revenue to expand next year even though the base for comparison this year will be high.
Hong Kong’s Chinese-language Apple Daily quoted Mr So as saying many mainlanders had yet to visit Macau, so mainland money would continue to be the principal driver of gaming revenue growth. “There will still be double-digit growth, roughly in the mid-teens,” he said.
The newspaper quoted the co-chairman of Melco Crown Entertainment Ltd, Lawrence Ho Yau Lung, as saying: “With the continuous growth of the mainland economy and improvement of [Macau’s] infrastructure, I believe the Macau gaming industry will perform well in both the mass and VIP markets.”
Apple Daily quoted the chief financial officer of Galaxy Entertainment Ltd, Robert Drake, as saying he expected gaming revenue growth of between 15 percent and 17 percent next year.
Gross gaming revenue in the first 11 months of this year was 327.29 billion patacas (US$40.9 billion), 18.6 percent more than in the equivalent period last year, official data show.
The director of the Macau Government Tourist Office, Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, said last week that the number of visitors would grow by fewer than 5 percent next year as the city focused on attracting big spenders.
