Macau Chief Executive Fernando Chui’s bold prediction may be right after all.

Back in July, the Macau official made a bold prediction that the city state’s economic decline may shrink to 7.2 percent this year, and even resume growth in 2017, thanks to the casino industry’s shift to mass market.

Data from the Statistics and Census Service, published on Tuesday, revealed that Macau’s gross domestic product has contracted by 7.1 percent in the second quarter of the year, marking the eight consecutive quarterly GDP decline as Macau’s gross gaming product continues to slide. But this quarter’s numbers are an improvement compared to the previous three months of 2016, when the city recorded a 13.3 percent drop in GDP.

The statistics bureau pinned the second quarter contraction to “slower declines in service exports and investment, as well as a lower base of comparison in the previous year.”