Inside Asian Gaming

IAG APR 2023年4月 亞博匯 34 The decline of the junket industry is significant, and while replacing the sheer revenue numbers they brought in is nigh on impossible – certainly in the short-term at least – the move by operators towards a premium mass- and direct VIP-focused model provides an avenue toward far greater profitability. This is why analysts have spent the past few months espousing Macau’s “better gaming mix”: under the junket model, operators typically paid their junket partners a commission of 1.25% on rolling which, against the theoretical win rate of 2.85% on baccarat, means the junkets were taking a chunky 43.9% slice of all GGR generated in their rooms! Still, Macau’s recovery may not be as rapid as it could be. The Director of the Macao Government Tourism Office (MGTO), Maria Helena de Senna Fernandes, said in February that up to 3,000 hotel rooms were offline purely due to labor shortages – a result of lower staffing needs during the pandemic and the suddenness of reopening. Housekeeping, cleaners and room attendants are among the positions operators are still struggling to fill – a problem that will only be exacerbated as new properties such as Galaxy Macau Phase 2 and Studio City Phase 2 come online. Both companies have stated a need to hire at least 1,000 new employees for those projects. “They are burdened with the lack of blue cards,” says Tash. “The spectacular occupancy in hotels during CNY (the MGTO said occupancy reached 85.7%) was not as high as it could have gone, because they simply did not have enough labor to turn the rooms over. The problem now is that the government is burdened with the task of suddenly bringing back in so many maids and room attendants that were cut because they were not needed and were all foreigners. “It is going to be a lot of processing of blue cards just to be able to ramp up. The other issue is many of the senior management expats who left are not coming back anytime soon, and we’re not sure the government is going to let them anyway, so this is the first test of those people who were once COVER STORY