Macau, China 25 Jan – Macau receive 21.7 million visitors last year, a decrease of 5.1 percent on 2008, the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) has announced.
Mainlanders, Hongkongers and Taiwanese accounted for 50.5 percent, 30.9 percent and 5.9 percent of all visitor arrivals last year, respectively.
The number of Hong Kong visitor arrivals – 6.7 million – almost reached that of the city’s population of seven million.
Last year’s visitor number included 332,529 Malaysians (down 5.4 percent) and 379,241 Japanese (up 3.4 percent).
Same-day visitors accounted for 52.2 percent of last year’s total number of visitor arrivals.
Visitors from Asia accounted for 96.8 percent of all visitor arrivals last year. In 2008, Asia’s share in Macau’s total number of visitor arrivals stood at 96.6 percent.
Last year, Macau recorded 278,661 visitors from the Americas (down 10.9 percent), 254,002 from Europe (down 6.7 percent) and 135,214 from Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (down 14 percent).
In 2009, 52.6 percent of all visitor arrived by land via Zhuhai, 39.9 percent arrived by sea from Hong Kong and Guangdong, and 7.5 percent arrived by air.
In December, the number of visitor arrivals rose 6.7 percent year-on-year to 2.03 million, corresponding to an average of 65,673 a day accordint to The Macau Post Daily.
(MacauNews)
