Macau’s notoriously aggressive promotional environment has settled into a rhythm, according to MGM Resorts CEO and President Bill Hornbuckle – despite competition in the premium gaming segments rising as former junket players return to the city in swathes.
Hornbuckle discussed the current state of the Macau market during a Q&A session at the Bank of America Securities 2025 Gaming & Lodging Conference this morning, where he also credited MGM’s efforts in transforming its Macau casino offerings for paving the way for the wider market’s shift towards the premium mass customer. The company has been the biggest mover in the market post-COVID, pushing its market share from below 10% to well above 16% on its concerted promotional efforts, gaming floor optimization and the addition of new suite inventory.
Addressing questions around promotional activity in Macau, for which MGM China has been criticized by some rival concessionaires in the past, Hornbuckle said the situation had never grown out of control but did note that his company led the way in many of the activities that are deemed commonplace today.
“We got very aggressive on the casino floor with what our product needed and wanted to be, and we changed a bunch of things: how we fed people on the floor, how the floor is designed, the padding in the carpet which believe it or not is a real discussion [in Macau], the lighting, the correlation between how you position the games. We went deeply into that in the context of asking customers what they wanted to see, what they wanted to do, what they wanted to participate in, and I think we’ve been rewarded for it. Now others are following suit and that’s not a surprise.
“Fortunately, although it’s always aggressive [in Macau], we haven’t seen it creep out of control, so I think the programming is in play. I think the government watches that all now closely anyway, so I think there is a check and balance on that.
“We’re going to hit a 28% margin, give or take, so I’m excited by where that has gone and where it’s going.”
Hornbuckle also noted that the addition of more villas and suites at peninsula property MGM Macau and its flagship resort MGM Cotai had also allowed it to better serve the premium customer.
“We were under-suite-ed and we are under-roomed given our scale, and we have outperformed,” he said. “Picking up 100 more tables didn’t hurt and if you look back at the old model, we’ve really added 200 tables – 100 new ones plus we had 100 that were tied to junkets and not as productive from a margin perspective as I thought they could be, so now we’ve unleashed all of that and it is paying dividends for us.”
On the state of the premium customer in 2025, Hornbuckle explained that Macau remains an attractive destination for Asia’s high rollers and an “exception” when compared to hotel industry concerns across mainland China.
“What’s happened is the junket tiers have obviously now gone but VIP customers are still coming – and in mass,” he said, “We have seen from Southeast Asia and other places that we have offices in and market to that there has been a big lift. I also think we have a distinct advantage there because others have relied more on junkets historically and therefore have not been established.
“We know the customers, we know where they live, so we’re in a great position to do that.
“The other part of it is that [Beijing has] allowed people to come. If you go back a year or two years ago, they were telling the individual person ‘I’m sorry, you’ve been [to Macau] four times, you can’t go a fifth time’. All of that has stopped for now and I think they’re letting the market run.
“I mean, it’s just over US$30 billion [annual run rate] and I think it’s got some more room to grow. It won’t be US$45 billion anytime soon but I think that’s the reality that we all understand.”
