Macau's gross gaming revenues leaped 246.9 percent year on year to 12.7 billion patacas (US$1.57 billion) in March, the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau (DICJ) has announced today.
Month-on-month, according to DICJ data, Macau casinos' takings rose 23.3 percent. Last month's receipts were the highest so far this year. They also recorded the highest year-on-year growth since July 2021.
The Macau government started to ease its nearly three-year-long COVID-19 travel curbs early this year.
Compared to pre-pandemic March 2019, whose gross gaming revenues stood at 25.8 billion patacas, last month's amounted to just 49.3 percent.
In the first quarter, gross gaming revenues reached 34.6 billion patacas, an increase of 94.9 percent from the same period of last year.
According to the latest available DICJ data, Macau's six rival gaming operators (SJM, Galaxy, Sands, Melco, Wynn, MGM) owned a total of 30 casinos at the end of last year, down from 42 at the beginning of 2022. SJM's number of casinos shrank by 10 between the first and last quarters in 2022, from 23 to 13. Galaxy closed two of its six casinos last year. The four other operators' number of casinos remained unchanged.
Baccarat is Macau's most popular game of chance. It generated 85.6 percent of the sector's takings last year, DICJ data shows.
At the end of last year, the industry ran 5,605 gaming tables and 10,775 gaming machines, down by 6.9 percent and 8.3 percent year on year, respectively, from the end of 2021.
