The secretary, who was speaking in the region’s legislative assembly to present and discuss the Lines of Government Action (LAG) for 2021 in areas he oversees, said that the government would continue with “the work of opening for tender the new concessions for the award of gambling” licences.

The government should next year make public the specifications for bidders to prepare for the public tender scheduled for 2022, when the current concessions will come to an end.

The announcement comes two weeks after gambling analysts on 12 November, just days before the government presented the LAGs, told Lusa that it should postpone the public tender for the new gambling licenses, due to the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic. The latter has seriously affected the economy of the world’s casino capital, with operators in the territory suffering huge losses equivalent to hundreds of millions of euros in the third quarter.

In the first 10 months of this year, casino revenue was down 81.4% on the same period last year, due to the strict border restrictions prompted by the pandemic. It was only at the end of September that China’s central government allowed visas once more to be issued for travel from the mainland to Macau.

In presenting its LAG, the government wrote that “in view of the expiry of the concession contracts for casino gambling in June 2022, work will be carried out continuously with a view to the opening of the tender for new concessions for casino gambling.” It also specified that it would encourage concessionaires and sub-concessionaires to “extend non-gambling correlative activities”.

In his comments on Friday, the secretary for economy and finance recalled the impact of the pandemic in the territory, stating that “the overall objectives in the area of economy and finance are the stabilisation of the economy [and] the maintenance of employment” in addition to “the prevention and control of the pandemic and the resumption of economic activities”.
To that end, he said, the executive wanted to diversify the economy – which is heavily dependent on tourism and casinos – with a particular focus on the pharmaceutical industry in the area of traditional Chinese medicine.

“A single industry gives rise to a single source of employment,” the secretary told the assembly. “For this reason, we urgently need to foster the diversification of the economy in order to gradually overcome the problem of the predominance of a single industry.”

He recalled that 75 per cent of the territory’s gross domestic product is generated from the gambling sector.

Law Wai Nong also announced the strengthening of public investment, with MOP18.5 billion earmarked for public works next year.

Macau has had a total of 46 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 since the end of January. There are no known cases of community transmission and currently no active cases.

The Covid-19 pandemic has claimed at least 1,422,951 lives out of more than 60.4 million confirmed cases of infection worldwide.