In terms of retail and restaurant sales in Macao, 2024 continued its year-on-year downward trend in October. That’s according to new figures from the Statistics and Census Service (known by its Portuguese initials DSEC).
Restaurants in Macao saw their receipts slip by 1.8 percent year-on-year, while retailers included in the DSEC’s survey saw an overall drop of 13.3 percent when comparing their performance with October 2023.
By category, retailers of watches and jewellery fared the worst, with sales experiencing a 25.1 percent year-on-year decline. Department stores and cosmetics stores followed, down 16.9 and 12.3 percent respectively. Motor vehicle sales, in contrast, soared by 41.4 percent in October, compared with last year.
[See more: People from Macao and Hong Kong spend 454 million yuan in Zhuhai each month]
October’s sales saw a notable month-on-month uplift, however. Restaurants’ receipts rose by 6.8 percent, while surveyed retailers reported a sales surge of 28.6 percent overall. Those jumps were due to the National Day holiday, DSEC noted, when Macao welcomed record-breaking numbers of visitors.
At the same time, both Macao restaurateurs and retailers expected consumer sentiment to wane in the wake of the holiday, with most saying they were braced for sales to drop in November.
Earlier this month, the chairman of the Macau Small and Medium Enterprises Development Alliance, Sunny Ip Sio Man, told media that the SAR’s smaller-sized businesses were “going through a depression” worse than during the Covid-19 pandemic. He highlighted the fact that residents increasingly leave the city to shop, heading into the mainland to take advantage of its lower prices and wider variety of goods.
