In most large Asian integrated resorts, the floor plan still encodes an older hierarchy. The main floor carries the volume: tourists, locals, electronic terminals, baccarat at table limits an ordinary player can meet. Upstairs, behind a desk and a door, sit the private salons built for a business that, in revenue terms, is quietly shrinking. Tiger Resorts’ latest numbers for Okada Manila put a figure on that geography.
The two numbers everyone quotes, and the one they skip
Okada Manila’s third quarter showed mass-market table games revenue up 20 per cent year-on-year to PHP3.01bn (US$47.8m) while VIP table games revenue fell 21.4 per cent to US$18m. That is the mass gaming vs VIP split in one line, and it reads as a clean story about resilient mass-market play. Group gross gaming revenue rose just 0.9 per cent, slot revenue fell four per cent to US$45.8m, and EBITDA was down 27 per cent to PHP4.06bn across the first nine months.
The number most write-ups skip is the drop. Mass table drop, the amount actually wagered through the cage, rose 5.4 per cent to US$143m. Revenue rose 20 per cent. Those two figures are not the same claim. Volume grew modestly; the rest of the revenue gain came from how the tables held, which is partly a function of what players bet on and partly a function of luck over a thirteen-week window.
Treat the gap carefully, because the revenue figure is reported in pesos and the drop in dollars, and growth rates struck on different currency bases are not directly comparable. But even allowing for that, the honest version of the headline is narrower than the one in circulation: Okada Manila’s mass business grew, and a meaningful slice of the growth in revenue was hold, not handle. That distinction matters whenever you read a quarterly release, and it is the same reason a double-digit revenue jump at any property deserves a second look at how casino revenue is actually calculated before anyone calls it a trend.
| Metric (Q3, year-on-year) | Reported figure | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Group GGR | — | +0.9% |
| Mass-market table games revenue | PHP3.01bn (US$47.8m) | +20% |
| Mass table drop | US$143m | +5.4% |
| VIP table games revenue | US$18m | -21.4% |
| Slot machine revenue | US$45.8m | -4% |
| EBITDA (nine months) | PHP4.06bn | -27% |
What actually separates mass gaming from VIP
Mass-market gaming is cash play at posted table limits from walk-in customers, tourists and local residents; VIP gaming is high-limit play by a small number of high rollers, historically introduced and financed through junket operators on credit. The difference is not just bet size. It is who carries the risk, how much of each wagered unit the operator keeps, and how violently the segment moves from quarter to quarter.
Why VIP margins are thinner despite bigger bets
VIP rolling chip programmes pay out most of the theoretical win before it reaches EBITDA. Commissions to the introducing party, rebates on turnover, free flights, suites and food all come off the top of a game with a thin theoretical margin to begin with: baccarat’s house edge is well under 1.5 per cent on banker and player bets. Mass baccarat and mass tables keep a far larger share of what is dropped, pay no turnover rebate, and come with no receivable to chase. A dollar of mass revenue and a dollar of VIP revenue are not worth the same amount to an operator, and they never were.
Volatility compounds the problem. A VIP salon doing US$18m a quarter can swing double digits on the fortunes of a handful of players, which is why VIP lines move 20 per cent in either direction and mass lines rarely do. On a short series of very large bets, the law of large numbers has not had time to do its work.
What junket operators used to do, and why that stopped
Junkets solved two problems the casino could not solve itself: they found and vetted high rollers in mainland China, and they extended credit and collected debts in a jurisdiction where gambling debts are not enforceable. That second function is the whole business. Remove the ability to market cross-border and settle debts, and the junket model has no product left to sell. Operators that leaned on it did not simply lose customers; they lost the only distribution channel that reached those customers.
Why the VIP decline is structural rather than cyclical
VIP gaming across Asia is under durable legal and regulatory pressure, not a post-pandemic demand dip. Three forces are doing the work, and none of them reverses with a tourism recovery.
- Criminal enforcement against the largest Macau junket promoters after 2021 removed the segment’s dominant intermediaries and shrank the licensed promoter base sharply.
- China’s amended criminal law targeting the organisation of citizens to gamble abroad, alongside long-standing capital controls and restrictions on card use for gaming, cut the legal pathways for both marketing and money movement.
- Tighter supervision in the Philippines, including PAGCOR’s own regulatory tightening and the government’s shutdown of offshore gaming operations, has made Manila a less comfortable home for grey-area high-roller flow.
The test for whether something is cyclical is simple: ask what has to happen for it to come back. Pandemic-era softness unwound when borders reopened. For VIP to return to its pre-2019 shape, a sovereign government would have to reverse a capital-controls policy and a criminal statute. That is a different category of headwind.
The same split, across the region
Okada Manila’s quarter is a local instance of a regional pattern. Macau’s operators have spent the period since the 2022 concession renewals reorganising around mass and premium mass play, with non-gaming investment obligations written into the concessions themselves, and VIP baccarat’s share of Macau’s gross gaming revenue now sits far below where it stood before 2019. Those shares are published by Macau’s gaming regulator and should be cited directly rather than paraphrased when exact figures are needed; operators’ own segment splits appear in their quarterly filings.
Premium mass is where the pivot has landed. It is still cash play, still recorded at the table at mass hold, but with higher limits, direct host relationships and comps paid by the property rather than commissions paid to a third party. The customer looks a little like a VIP. The economics look like mass.
What this changes in how operators plan revenue
Mass and premium mass give planners something VIP never did: a revenue line that can be forecast. Drop scales roughly with visitation, hotel occupancy and local demand, and hold on mass tables is stable enough over a year to budget against. VIP revenue depends on a short list of individuals, a credit book and a legal environment set in Beijing.
That is why capital is moving toward rooms, retail, food and premium mass salons rather than junket relationships, and why marketing spend is shifting from commissions to owned player databases and loyalty systems. It also changes the balance sheet: no rolling chip programme means no VIP receivables and no counterparty exposure to an intermediary that might be prosecuted. The flip side, which operators and regulators both have to own, is that a mass-led model rests more heavily on local recreational players, which makes deposit limits, self-exclusion and player-protection enforcement a commercial issue rather than a compliance footnote.
None of this makes a mass pivot automatically profitable. Okada Manila’s nine-month EBITDA fell 27 per cent to PHP4.06bn while its mass table revenue was growing 20 per cent in the quarter. Mass is the more defensible business; it is not, on these numbers, a business that has yet repaired the property’s earnings.
What would confirm it, and what would not
Watch the drop line, not the revenue line. If mass table drop keeps climbing through the next several quarters while hold settles back toward its normal range and revenue holds up anyway, the structural reading is correct. If drop growth stalls at around five per cent and the revenue line reverses as hold normalises, then this quarter was a good run of cards dressed as a trend.
The second thing to watch is regulatory. Any loosening of junket licensing in Macau or the Philippines, or any change in how cross-border gaming marketing is prosecuted, would be the first real evidence that the VIP segment has a floor rather than a slope. Until one of those moves, the sensible base case is the one Okada Manila’s split implies: a smaller, steadier, lower-ceiling business where the money comes off the main floor and the salons upstairs keep getting quieter.