Inside Asian Gaming

IAG NOV 2022年11月 亞博匯 144 10 YEARS AGO I t’s a story we’re all familiar with by now. Macau’s casino stocks, once the envy of the gaming world, have been pressured to record lows in recent years by China’s anti-gambling measures, uncertainty around concession re-tendering and most importantly the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it wasn’t always this way. A decade ago, Inside Asian Gaming ’s cover story (November 2012) examined the ongoing attractiveness of Macau gaming stocks on the back of 35% average annual growth over the previous decade and anticipation of steady, sustainable returns in the years ahead. While the explosive growth that embodied Macau’s arrival as a global gaming hub had eased by 2012, IAG noted at the time that new investors into the sector were happy to enjoy these smaller and more predictable returns. Macau, analysts said, was “becoming eminently more marriageable in the eyes of this second group, who constitute a different breed in key respects from those who’ve bought the sector for the dizzying top line growth it’s delivered for much of the post-monopoly era. “Notwithstanding a medium term in which revenue growth is likely to be more muted than in the past, it’s Macau’s overarching cash flow story that