China's Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) received 15.15 million visitor arrivals in the first 11 months, setting a new record.

According to the latest release from the Macao Statistics and Census Bureau, the figure represented an increase of 42.1 percent over the same period of last year, and more than doubled the number of visitor arrivals for the whole of 1999, when Macao returned to the motherland.

The number of visitor arrivals has steadily risen since the handover, totaling 9.16 million in 2000, 10.27 million in 2001, 11.53 million in 2002 and 11.88 million last year.

In November, visitors from China's mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan made up 93.7 percent of Macao's total number of visitor arrivals.

The Macao SAR government regards tourism and gaming as its "flagship" industries. The mainland's relaxation on individual Hong Kong and Macao-bound tours, which started in July last year, has become the main factor to boost tourism of Macao with a population of 461,000.