Mainland China is the only place to have a largely quarantine-free travel bubble with Macau. Guangdong province has been the largest source of the city’s inbound mainland tourists in recent months.

However, in recent days, the number of mainland communities where residents would be subject to quarantine on arrival in Macau, has been growing.

Communities in Guangdong cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen were this week added to Macau’s quarantine-on-arrival list this week, according to updates made by Macau’s Covid-19 task force.

Success Universe’s Mr Ma believed that the coming “two to three weeks” would be the key time to watch if mainland cases were curbed.

The Ponte 16 boss added: “The summer break would still look positive for Macau, provided that the Covid-19 infection cases were all contained in the coming two to three weeks on the mainland.”

Mr Ma said he had expected Macau to see continuous recovery in mass market and resort visit business in July and August, a peak time for families’ outbound travel.

Macau Travel Industry Council’s Mr Wu said that his group estimated Macau would welcome a daily average of 30,000 to 40,000 tourists for July and August, assuming the travel ties with Hong Kong had not yet resumed by then.

But he admitted that the recent reports of infections in mainland China posed uncertainty on the timing of further easing of travel ties between the mainland and Macau.

The mainland’s electronic application system for Individual Visit Scheme exit visas is yet to be reinstated. Group travel visas are also yet to be resumed.

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“The reimposition of stricter quarantine measures in March… created more difficulties in the construction of Emerald Bay in terms of labour mobilization and materials delivery just as we were generating momentum,” said José Angel Sueiro, COO of PH Resorts Group Holdings.

In a May 14 filing, PH Resorts said Emerald Bay would be constructed in two phases, with the first one “expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2022.”

The company had previously mentioned a second quarter 2022 completion for the initial phase of the property.

Mr Sueiro added in his commentary, that the new timing for Emerald Bay’s first phase completion would be “ideal”, with tourism recovery likely to be “well under way by that time”.

The company also suggested that tourism bounce back could be linked to expansion of vaccination effort with the domestic holiday market one of the improving areas.

At completion of its first phase, Emerald Bay is due to have 122 gaming tables to be shared between mass-market, premium mass and junkets, 600 electronic gaming machines and 270 hotel rooms.

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Revenue for the period was HKD 5.07 billion, up 0.5% from a year earlier, but flat from the fourth quarter of 2020. 

Net gaming revenue decreased 4.7% year-on-year, to nearly HKD 3.86 billion. The figure was up 5.6% sequentially. The numbers were given in a summary filed with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Galaxy Entertainment runs its flagship casino resort Galaxy Macau on Cotai, the StarWorld Hotel, the group’s main venue on Macau peninsula, and Broadway Macau, the mass-market focused complex next door to Galaxy Macau.

Last month, the casino operator said in a statement that it was offering pit supervisors in its table games department a payment of MOP 380,000 if they wished to resign “voluntarily”. 

Galaxy Entertainment said the “one-off payment” would be settled together with the compensation for each volunteer’s last month of employment.

The company had already introduced a voluntary exit program for pit managers in the table games department, added the statement.

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Cheung adds that players from those countries are underserved in their home markets. Japan approved IR but those venues are several years from opening, leaving pachinko as one of the dominant forms of gaming in Japan.

South Korean casinos are mainly accessible to foreign visitors, while Macau is the only Chinese territory where gambling is permitted.

“That is why structurally, for the last ten years, Singapore and Malaysia have been growing much slower than Macau or the Philippines,” said Cheung.

The Goldman director says casino spending as a percentage of disposable income among Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans is lower than their peers in countries such as Malaysia and Singapore.

Japanese IR may consume pachinoko’s market share

When Japan’s highly anticipated initial trio of IR opens, it’s likely those venues may not drive a significant increase in gaming numbers among domestic gamblers, but rather will eat into pachinko’s market share.

“Once IR are allowed to open in Japan, it may not drive a significant amount of local gaming spending but perhaps more of a dilution of market share from pachinko business,” said Goldman’s Cheung.

The low-stakes game will not be allowed in the IR when those venues open. Earlier this month, Japan’s Casino Regulatory Commission said slot machines and table games including baccarat, blackjack, craps, pai gow, and various forms of poker will be permitted.

Japan has yet to decide which cities will be homes to the first three casinos, though Nagasaki, Osaka, and Yokohama are among the leading contenders. Following a series of delays and snafus, it’s unlikely to open before 2026 or 2027.

Mass players rather than VIPs would be the key for recovery

In the years ahead, Cheung believes the Asian markets with the most devoted domestic gamblers will recover more rapidly from the effects of the pandemic than destination markets. Those slated for rapid rebounds in his opinion are Cambodia, Macau and Malaysia.

In general, Cheung predicts the Asia Pacific’s gaming figures returning to pre-pandemic levels next year, driven by pent-up demand from mass market gamblers.

His view on the 2022 time line to recovery accord with forecasts set forth by other analysts. Many believe Macau will rebound faster than Singapore and that it will be mass and premium mass players do the heavy lifting.

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Consumer demand for Macau gaming is “recovering comfortably,” wrote JP Morgan analysts DS Kim, Derek Choi and Livy Lyu. They estimated casino GGR in Macau for the first 18 days of April at MOP5.5 billion, or MOP280 million a day.

Also in the memo, brokerage Sanford C. Bernstein said the GGR improvement seen in the prior week was “mainly due to better mass consumer traffic over the weekend and continued high VIP hold.”

“While visitation was softer in the first half of last week, visitor arrivals reached a 15 month high of 34,252 on 16 April,” said analysts Vitaly Umansky, Kelsey Zhu and Louis Li.

Macau has recently seen a steady uptick in the number of visitor arrivals, the Macao Government Tourism Office said in a Sunday release. The average daily volume was 27,404 visitor arrivals for the seven days from April 9 to April 15 inclusive. The April 16 tally was the highest daily count since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic last year.

In its note, JP Morgan said that month-to-date GGR has recovered to just above 35% of pre- Covid-19 levels, “with mass and VIP volumes at about 40% to 45% and 20%, respectively, compared to April 2019”.

“We estimate VIP luck was high at 3.7% plus win rate (versus theoretical 2.9% to 3%, but VIP doesn’t really move the needle for GGR anymore,” stated the JP Morgan team.

Sanford Bernstein forecast Macau’s April GGR to be down “in the low 60s of percent” compared to the same month in 2019. “Macau should continue to experience headwinds during first-half 2021, but we see strong GGR improvement beginning in second half as Covid-19-related travel constraints begin to fall away,” said the analysts.

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Macau’s gambling sector remains the chief engine of the local economy and Bloomberg reported that government representatives had approached several casino operators regarding the potential of allowing gamblers to purchase casino chips using digital yuan.

China began testing its digital yuan project in Shenzhen last year and things went well enough that the government expanded the pilot project to include multiple cities and a growing number of businesses.

Unlike many digital currencies, the digital yuan allows the People’s Bank of China to track all transactions back to individual users, reducing the likelihood that the currency will be used for illicit purposes.

It remains to be seen whether Macau might simply allow its casinos the option of adding the digital yuan to their list of funding options or whether the digital currency would become the only permissible option. The latter could have a significant impact on junket operators, with a knock-on negative for the casinos themselves.

China’s strict capital controls keep a tight lid on mainland residents’ ability to transfer money off the mainland, which led to the creation of the junket sector. Essentially, junkets provide credit to high-rolling gamblers, with debts repaid once the gambler returns to the mainland.

The prevailing theory is that the digital yuan’s use in casinos would increase mass market gamblers’ ability to use their mainland savings without going through illegal channels. However, their activity would be subject to monitoring by mainland authorities, the impact of which might negate any possible benefit.

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