Macao, the gambling mecca of China, saw a massive influx of both players and revenue this May.
Thanks to the Golden Week holiday, the year-on-year gaming revenue grew by 492% to 10.4 billion patacas this month alone. That’s approximately 1.3 billion USD - not bad for just one month of gaming. Of course, this is still far from the numbers Macao had been making in gambling revenue before COVID-19 struck. May revenue, for example, is 60% lower than what casinos were generating in 2019.
Macao generated only 60 billion patacas in revenue during 2020.
Still, 2021 is showing signs of a successful recovery so far. Revenue in May was record-breaking for this year and a sign of better times to come for the Macao gambling industry. Golden Week, a traditional early May holiday in China, ran from May 1 to May 5 this year and saw 167,000 tourists swarm the city. That’s a 25% increase over the whole month of April and more than double the amount of visitors the city had during the holidays in February. For many resorts, May was the best and most profitable month since the beginning of the pandemic.
Wynn Resorts has made an average of $3 billion per day during Golden Week.
“[This was] by far the highest amount of normalized profit that we’ve been able to generate since the onset of the pandemic at the beginning of 2020,” said Matt Maddox, CEO of Wynn Resorts.
Wynn Resorts is one of many casino businesses that see massive profits in Macao and other places in Asia, where gambling is thriving as a business. Some companies even started selling their Las Vegas properties to focus their efforts towards the Asian market, where the profit margins are much higher. While this isn’t great news for US-based casino players that prefer playing in brick-and-mortar establishments, at least their favourite casino sites will remain online and available in the same regions as before.
