Union Gaming Research Macao Ltd. estimates that the number of electronic table game (ETG) seats in the Macau market will increase by more than 60% in the next three years.
In its third annual review of the product segment, Research House said it currently has around 5,500 seats in Macau. It added that it could increase by at least 3,500 (64%) over the next 36 months as new properties open in Kotai and casino operators look to increase their minimum bets, allowing them to more efficiently leverage valuable live table allocations under the Macau government’s live dealer table cap.
Live table caps are calculated at a compound annual growth rate of 3% by the end of 2022, based on 5,485 tables in the market at the end of the fourth quarter of 2012.
Union Gaming is a “…To accommodate the low-end public market, these [low-end public market] customers are being relegated to ETG as the best option to play at lower stakes (e.g., less than HK$500 per person in Bakara). Large stadium-style ETG installations have become commonplace across all major properties, particularly in Kotai’s large box properties.”
However, industry sources referred to by GGRAsia noted that Macau’s government is scrutinizing, to a minimum, the question of the speed and size of possible bets on such machines and traditional slot machines thanks to electronic betting, cautioning against future growth in Macau’s ETG segment. That is not regardless of whether individual ETG products have live dealers.
The problem for the government is that low-income families could lose a lot of money in a short period of time through ETGs and slots, the sources said.
In January, Macao’s Minister of Economy and Finance, Francis Tambac, told the legislative council that the government was considering a limit on the number of “slots,” but continued to refer to “electronic games” as a genre.
“Because of the rapid growth of electronic gaming equipment, the current slot is very different than it was in the past, so we actually started researching it,” he told lawmakers.
However, it is not clear what is the timeline for implementing such a cap.
For the time being, the Macau market has been particularly aggressive in adopting ETG. Union Gaming suggests that what might have begun with casino operators as an expedient response to table caps has proven to be a profitable business model, with a relatively quick return on investments in the equipment’s upfront capital cost.
Macau’s stadium-style ETG “victory” per seat per day (i.e., amount bet minus goods paid) increased 92% between the first quarter of 2011 and 2014, while its average quarterly seating base increased more than 400% from about 650 to 3,251 seats, according to a memo from Union Gaming.
BY: 홀짜게임