The Macau SAR meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions (MICE) sector is fighting “hard to survive” as the pandemic continued to impact the local industry for the last two years, Lo Tak Chong, President of the Macau International Grand Events Promotion Association told Macau News Agency.
“There are no tourists, visitor numbers are low and so many events have been cancelled. We had planned to go to mainland China for an exhibition in February and March and everything was cancelled due to outbreaks. We have a coming event in June in cooperation with the Guangdong government that was delayed until January 2023,” Lo expressed
In the first quarter of the year, more than 1.87 million visitors passed by Macau, an 8 per cent increase from the same quarter of last year but still a considerably smaller number than pre-pandemic times.
After the pandemic led to a plunge in visitation from almost 40 million in 2019 to 5.8 million in 2020, the total tally has improved to more than 7.7 million in 2021, most of them hailing from mainland China.
Meanwhile, according to data provided by the Statistics and Census Bureau, some 449 conventions and exhibitions were organized in Macau in 2021 attracting 1.4 million participants, representing a decrease of 70 per cent and 90 per cent, respectively, compared to 2019.
Receipts and expenditure of the exhibition organisers totalled MOP76.97 million and MOP172 million respectively in 2021.
The organisers of the 2022 Global Gaming Expo (G2E) Asia also revealed this month that after several consecutive years of being held in the Macau SAR and after multiple pandemics related delays, the event will be moved from the SAR to the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore.
“There’s not much we can do for now, the only thing is that we try to find some more international events for next year, but we do not know what the future holds,” Lo noted.
According to Lo, even in pre-pandemic times, local authorities were already providing subsidies and grants for local events – mainly via the Macao Trade and Investment Promotion Institute (IPIM) – however, he underlined that this financial aid only covered about 10 to 20 per cent of the event costs.
As for available human resources, the managing director of MacExpo Exhibition Co. Ltd noted that actually in the past two to three months it has been easier than usual to hire staff.
“I have a small company and when we tried to hire quality people before it was very difficult but now it is a little bit easier to get an interview and maybe sometimes despite our proposed salary not being as good as they would get before they are willing to do it,” he said.
Lo also remarked that he has not seen many people leaving or being laid off in the past three months, since most that would leave the industry have already done so in the past three years since the pandemic outbreak.
As for the future, he warned that even if the pandemic subsided it would be hard for the sector to return to its previous level if the role of the gaming sector – the main propellant of the local economy – continues to be reduced in the SAR as part of the government diversification drive.
“The Chinese government has some policies to incentivise Macau to diversify its economy, they don’t want too much of a focus on gaming, so it will be difficult to get back to what it was before but I do believe the Chinese government will help us surpass the situation at the moment,” he told MNA.
