Macau's casino gross gaming revenue (GGR) for the first 14 days of July is estimated at 8.3 billion MOPs ($1.03 billion) per day, or 593 million MOPs, according to a Monday memo from JPMorgan Securities (Asia Pacific) Ltd, citing its own industry inspections.

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As demand for the summer holiday season starts to gradually come in, that means last week's utilization rate was 635 million MOPs per day, a 15% improvement from the previous week," wrote JPMorgan analysts DS Kim, Mupansi and Celina Lee.

"The Euro 2024 has just finished this morning Hong Kong time, and we expect volumes to gradually improve by the peak of summer holidays in the coming weeks," they added

According to investment analysts, Macau's casino GGR has historically been negatively affected by large international soccer tournaments like Europe's UEFA Euro, with some punters temporarily shifting their attention from casino betting to sports betting.

On a monthly basis, JP Morgan estimated the popular market GGR to be "at 105% to 110% of pre-COVID levels, while VIPs are in the mid-to-late 20% range."

"This is a slightly softer than the trend in the second quarter, but it's a weekly trend that could be very volatile either way, and we won't read too much into the print just yet," the JP Morgan team added.

"We expect July's GGR to be around MOP18.5 billion, slightly below the initial market expectations of more than MOP19 billion, due to a slower start to the end of the month," analysts said.

In a separate memo on Macau casino performance in the first two weeks of July, Citigroup said it was "conservatively" maintaining its full-July GGR forecast at MOP1.90 billion, about 78% of its pre-pandemic July 2019 level.

"As the first half of July is within Macao's usual seasonal barometer, it is fairly solid for Macao to achieve nearly 600 million GGR daily operations so far this month," the financial service wrote.