The over 35 casinos in Macau reportedly had a bad July after ending a recent spurt of comparable growth to post a 3.5% decline year-on-year in aggregate gross gaming revenues to approximately $3.03 billion.

Comparable disappointment:

According to a Thursday report from GGRAsia citing official figures from the enclave’s Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau, the result for the 31-day period stood in stark contrast to the 1.8% year-on-year rise seen for May as well as June’s even larger 5.9% surge and means that aggregated gross gaming revenues since the start of the year now stand 0.9% lower at about $21.58 billion.

Foreseen failing:

GGRAsia reported that the release of July’s result came after several investment firms had predicted flattening comparable revenues largely due to a drop-off in the market’s normally burgeoning VIP gaming market. One of these, Nomura Holdings Incorporated, had last week forecast that aggregated takings would top out at only around $3.29 billion before stating on Wednesday that the Macau market was being hurt as ‘underlying volume trends slowed in the last one to two weeks of July.’

Reportedly read the Japanese financial services firm’s July 31 statement…

“We believe that many premium customers took the last ten days to spend time with families. They always return though, so we view the slowdown as temporary. Despite the weaker month-end checks, we expect positive year-on-year growth to resume once we lap the tough +17.1% comp in August.”

Run-rate reduction:

For its part, Hong Kong-based brokerage, JP Morgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Limited, reportedly responded to last month’s result by describing the figure as ‘a disappointing print’ that came as daily run-rates decreased by some 0.6% month-on-month to stand at around $97.87 million, which was almost 4.5% lower than the $102.45 million average recorded for the first six months of 2019.

JP Morgan’s Thursday statement read…

“For July, we estimate VIP gross gaming revenues fell over 20% year-on-year and mass gross gaming revenues grew by twelve percent to 13% year-on-year and VIP clearly drove the downside versus expectation.”