Inside Asian Gaming

IAG AUG 2022年8月 亞博匯 34 2020 TO TODAY: THE COVID CRISIS So many column-inches in newspapers, magazines and websites have been devoted to COVID it is unnecessary to elaborate here beyond the thinnest of details. Smashing into Macau in the late January Chinese New Year of 2020 like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, COVID-19 saw the surreal and utterly unprecedented closure of all Macau casinos from 5 to 20 February 2020. It was the first time in living memory they had closed en masse . But worse than this 15-day economic-zero was the endless series of rolling border closures and travel restrictions, along with their near-absolute chilling effect on visitation from mainland China. From the 2019 GGR of MOP$292 billion (US$36.5 billion), Macau crashed by 80% year-on-year to a dismal MOP$60 billion (US$7.5 billion) in 2020. We saw a meagre improvement in 2021 to MOP$87 billion (US$10.9 billion), still only 30% of 2019 levels. But the first half of 2022 has been even worse than the preceding two years, with GGR a paltry MOP$26 billion (US$3.3 billion), a run rate just 18% of 2019 levels. It was the worst half-year of the 2.5 years of pandemic-affected business so far, from January 2020 to June 2022. And just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. The most recent quarter, 2022 Q2, ran at a miserable 12% of 2019 and July (not yet completed at the time of writing) could be the worst month since the pandemic began, with severe border restrictions in the first 10 days of the month followed by total casino closures from 11 July onwards. My guess is that July could come in around 2% of the 2019 monthly average – effectively economic-zero. COVER STORY