Macau: all our coverage

Macau's casinos won 10% less in October than a year earlier, the fifth monthly decline in a row and the second steepest of the year, even as the National Day holiday brought more than a million visitors. Year-to-date growth is down to 1.6%, but the government's budget figure is still well within reach.

Lower room rates cut MGM Resorts' Las Vegas Strip earnings by 12% in the third quarter, while MGM China posted record revenue and a record share of Macau. With the People Inc. bid gone, management turned to buybacks and to roughly $1 billion a year of spending on MGM Osaka in 2027 and 2028.

All six of Macau's casino operators signed up on Friday as passive investors in a MOP20 billion government guidance fund, with every pataca credited against the non-gaming spending they promised for their 2023 concessions. Sands China says its share replaces projects it had planned to build.

Marina Bay Sands took the bigger hit, with EBITDA down 21%, while Sands China's revenue rose 8.4% on the quarter and its share of Macao's mass market reached its highest since 2023. The parent still spent $950 million on its own shares, raised its 2027 dividend by 20% and took its Sands China stake to 75.56%.

The regulator's quarterly breakdown by game shows that one product, the mass and premium-mass baccarat table, lost more revenue than Macau's casinos lost in total. VIP baccarat was flat and slots grew by almost a fifth, which is the only reason the quarter's fall stopped at 3.8%.

Macau's Prosecutor General says the offence created in 2024 to drive money changers from the casinos is hard to prove, because police often catch a suspect on what can be shown only as a first exchange. He wants objective criteria or a legal presumption, a fix that would make convictions easier and the defence harder.

Police recorded 1,951 gaming-related crimes in Macau between January and September, while casino operators filed 2,968 suspicious transaction reports, both up on a year earlier even as overall crime fell and gaming revenue weakened through the third quarter. Fraud and illegal money exchange drove the rise; the loan-sharking and detention cases of the junket era kept falling.

Nevada's Gaming Control Board has backed Christopher Ruffin at Circus Circus and Sean Lanni at Aria and Park MGM, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports. One is licensing work he already does; the other, by his own account, wants the licence mainly for estate planning.

Yonhap, citing an unnamed source, says Grand Korea Leisure's marketing staff and executives have been meeting customers in Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore and Mongolia without proper legal review, 11 years after Chinese police arrested Korean casino staff for recruiting gamblers. GKL says its staff serve existing customers and recruit no one.

Galaxy Entertainment Group's chairman bought 4.6 million shares for cash on the first trading day after Macau's weakest monthly gaming revenue of the year, paying less than the stock traded for on the exchange that day. The filing shows the price; it does not show who sold.

A week after closure notices put eight Washington card rooms on course to shut on 30 November, Maverick Gaming's founder says he is buying them out of the bankruptcy and that the deal will close within three weeks. No buyer entity, price or court filing for the sale has been made public, and a new owner needs the state's gambling licence.

Macau's casinos won MOP18.06 billion in September, 1.2% less than a year earlier and 17.5% less than in August: the fourth monthly decline in a row and the weakest month of the year. It came in below a comparison base that a typhoon had already cut, and almost exactly at the figure Citigroup cut its forecast to ten days ago. It was published on the first day of Golden Week.

A week after reports that a smart-table mandate would not come before the second half of 2027, PAGCOR's chairman has named a start date and the four Entertainment City resorts it covers. The requirement is to begin converting, not to finish, and no circular, cost estimate or technical standard has been published.

SJM Holdings' 2026 interim report shows what Macau's end of satellite casinos did to Macau's longest-established operator: less revenue and a smaller share of the market, but a better margin and more gaming revenue in the casinos it now runs itself. The loss still widened, debt rose to HK$30.2 billion, and management says the job now is productivity.

The Apollo-owned slot, systems and fintech supplier has replaced what its chief executive calls a "stuffy" corporate identity with one built around a "casino as a service" pitch. It arrives in the same fortnight as a new finance chief hired to sharpen cash flow.

The Philippine regulator wants live visibility of bets across the gaming floor, according to Inside Asian Gaming, which reports that a mandate originally planned for this year has slipped and would start with the integrated resorts. PAGCOR has not announced the policy.

The second tranche of the Casino Control (Amendment) Act took effect on 21 September: the GRA can now weigh unethical conduct and systemic control failures when deciding whether Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa remain fit to hold a licence, the two must exchange patron information for financial-crime control, and cashing out a bet after the result is known is a crime.

Two weeks after calling September up 12%, Citigroup's analysts watched the tables on Friday and saw 401 premium-mass players betting HK$6.8 million, "among the worst in recent history". The forecast is now MOP18 billion, implying a 4% fall for the quarter, with the caveat that Golden Week may simply be absorbing the trips.

Every vested share the Melco chairman held outside the listed parent went into an irrevocable trust on 16 September, a filing shows. Control of the Macau operator does not move, but the shares that did are now reported as no longer his.

Premium volumes have dropped since August, HSBC and UBS both put the first 13 days flat year on year, and CLSA has cut 2027 by 4% with catalysts "not imminent". A week ago Citigroup called September up 12%.

The Statistics and Census Service's annual survey shows receipts up 8.8% and gross surplus up 9.3%, but the spend on player rebates and commissions rose 11.6%, the second year running it has outpaced the top line.

Citigroup expects MOP20.5 billion for the month even though the first six days ran 10% below August's daily rate. Last week CLSA put September growth at 0.3% against a 9.5% consensus. Both are reading the same shoulder month, and the gap between them is the widest of the year.

A peer-reviewed survey of 563 employees at six of Macau's integrated resort operators found 33.9% in the severe or extremely severe anxiety band and 16% reporting depression at the same level. The strongest protective factor the researchers identified costs an operator nothing: colleagues who talk to each other.

A Hong Kong default judgment against a Macau high roller cannot be enforced in Singapore because gambling debts offend the country's public policy, the High Court has ruled, even where the gambling was lawful at a licensed casino. The decision unsettles a 2004 precedent and the way Asian casinos extend credit to customers whose assets sit in Singapore.