The number of visitors to Macau from mainland China dropped by almost 80% year-on-year on Sunday as the reality of the impact the deadly Coronavirus is having on the city’s leisure and tourism industry was laid bare.
The massive decline, accelerating from 38.0% on Friday and 64.7% on Saturday, culminated in dramatic scenes at the Gongbei border gate on Monday where thousands of people were prevented from entering the SAR amid heavy restrictions placed on Hubei residents and anyone who has visited the province in the past 14 days.
Sunday’s figures, published by the Macao Government Tourism Office on Monday, took the total number of visitors to Macau over the first three days of the Lunar New Year Golden Week to 158,429 – down 60.5% over the same period in 2019 – while visitation from China has fallen 66.3% to 91,549 including a 79.6% drop on Sunday to 25,447.
The sheer scale of the decline even caught gaming analysts off-guard, with JP Morgan noting that Day 3 visitation “came in at only 45k, which was even lower than a normal weekday (Macau had average daily visits of 108k in 2019), hence particularly disappointing as demand/traffic was supposed to accelerate from Day 3, as per historical seasonality.”
Discussing the potential impact on the gross gaming revenue of Macau’s gaming operators over Chinese New Year, the investment bank added that while visitation and GGR don’t necessarily correlate, “it’s hard not to get disappointed by these figures. Our on-the-ground checks suggest overall downbeat trends as well, with noticeably slower traffic on mass/main gaming floors and meaningful trip cancellations at major junkets for the coming days (which were supposed to be VIP peak).”
Brokerage Bernstein offered a similar take in a Monday note, stating, “We see the situation progressing worse than originally expected. With the start of the Chinese New Year holiday over the weekend, we now have data and anecdotal evidence and the CNY holiday period is shaking up to be the weakest Macau has seen in years.
“Our early estimate for January and Jan/Feb (combined) of -1% to +2% year-on-year should not be relied upon. The cancellations and dramatically reduced visitation point to a dreadful outcome for CNY in Macau and we would expect material year-on-year declines in January and February – however, giving out an estimate at this time is guesswork and not meaningful. The results for Q1 will most certainly be much weaker than originally contemplated.”
In a dramatic escalation of control measures implemented on Monday, health authorities declared that almost 1,500 tourists from Hubei province – home to the city of Wuhan – would be contacted to either leave Macau or be relocated to an isolation center at Hac Sa, while anyone arriving from Hubei would be prevented from entering altogether.
As of 6pm on Monday, it was reported that just 371 Hubei tourists remained in Macau from the 1,493 in the city earlier in the day.
