For this edition of our magazine, we focus on Southeast Asia, with a particular look at the Philippines. The country’s casino industry has been among the hardest hit in Asia, with the integrated resorts in Manila’s Entertainment City having remained mostly closed to the general public since the beginning of the crisis last year.

In this April edition of Asia Gaming Briefings we take the pulse of how the North Asia jurisdictions of Japan, Korea and the Russian Far East have fared.

The world is bouncing back, or at least coming to grips with the fact that going forward not much will be the same as before. Commendably, this industry quickly understood the need to adapt to a new normal, and that the days of targeting the low hanging fruit of the VIP sector are gone.

Over the years, many of the answers have been remarkably prescient in their forecasts for the near-term direction of Asia’s gaming industry. However, we can safely say that no one came anywhere close to guessing what 2020 may have had in store.

While nowhere in the world has escaped the economic fallout from the Covid-19 crisis, Macau has been hit harder than most, with forecasts for gross domestic product to shrink more than 50 percent this year.

Before the Covid-19 crisis, tourism in the Greater Mekong Sub-Region was at a record high, on track to welcome 80 million visitors in 2019, generating some $90 billion in revenue.