The wonks here at Asian Gaming Intelligence tend to throw a lot of figures about the Macau gaming industry at our hard-pressed readers. In the end all you really want to know is are things better, worse or the same as before?
If only it were that simple. As always, the devil is in the detail. One person’s year-on-year monthly growth is another person’s downward trend for the quarter.
What to do? AGI has opted for identifying statistical tendencies, but laying off calling it a trend unless it shows up in consecutive months.
On that basis, Macau’s stellar revenue performance in the final three days of January looks more like a tendency related to the feel good factor of the Lunar New Year holiday than a trend.
Macau casinos appear to have booked between 1.4 billion patacas and 1.6 billion patacas in revenue in the final three days of January, but the monthly totals are still down 17% year on year, the steepest decline for nearly four years.
Nonetheless the month-end sales lifted January’s revenue to 8.57 billion patacas, the best showing since the National Day holiday week in October last year.
The preliminary figures, routinely leaked to the Portuguese-language news agency Lusa, have a reputation for accuracy, suggesting someone in high places must be sanctioning them.
