Macau, China, 11 Jan – The Macau Special Administrative Region (MSAR) received 28 million visitors in 2011, a figure which represents a rise of 12.2 percent on 2010, the director of Tourism Services (DST), João Costa Antunes, said in Macau.

Citing provisional figures, the director of the DST said that the number of visitors from Greater China (Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan) was almost 25 million people, a year-on-year rise of 13.5 percent whilst the number of international visitors rose by 2.2 percent.

In 1999, before the MSAR was established, the number of international visitors was 580,000 or 7.8 percent of all visitors, whilst in 2011 around 3 million international visitors went to Macau, accounting for 10.9 percent of total visitors.

Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan remain the main source of visitors and from mainland China alone Macau received 16 million visitors, or 22.2 percent more than in the previous year, over half of which were from Guangdong province.

The South Korean market also performed well and saw a 20.2 percent rise in the number of visitors to almost 400,000 people. (macauhub)