In Macau, the government has reportedly revealed that it raked in $4.64 billion in taxes from gambling between January and May, which was a 12.4% increase year-on-year, and that the activity had accounted for 82.9% of its total tax revenues.

According to a report from GGRAsia citing provisional figures from the Financial Services Bureau, the tax amount compared to $4.11 billion for the same five-month period last year while the first eleven months of 2016 saw gambling account for nearly 78% of the former Portuguese enclave’s overall revenues.

After suffering through 26 months of year-on-year declines, Macau’s casinos saw their aggregated gross gaming revenues for August improve by 1.1% to $2.35 billion while September’s figure of $2.29 billion represented a swell of 7.4%. This trend continued in October with an 8.8% boost to $2.72 billion before being surpassed by a 14.4% advance to $2.34 billion in November. Even better, December’s figure subsequently grew by 8% to hit almost $2.5 billion while combined takings in January rose by 3.1% to reach nearly $2.41 billion before February saw a 17.8% boost to $2.87 billion.

More recently and aggregated gross gaming revenues for Macau’s casinos reached just over $2.65 billion for March, which was an 18.1% improvement year-on-year, followed by a 16.3% boost for April to $2.52 billion and an impressive 23.7% swell last month to $2.83 billion.

GGRAsia moreover reported that official figures from the Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau regulator showed that total aggregated gross gaming revenues in Macau hit approximately $13.24 billion for the initial five months of 2017, which was up by 15.8% year-on-year, while the government’s fiscal surplus for the same period had risen by 44.7% to just over $2.96 billion.

Macau levies an effective tax rate of 39% on all of its casinos’ gross gaming revenues and its government earlier conservatively predicted that total takings for 2017 would reach in excess of $24.89 billion, which would give it approximately $8.94 billion in tax with which to play.