On January 10th, 2008, Beijing announced their plan that after the Lunar New Year, they will begin their nationwide rollout of their lottery offering. Chinese lottery profits improved about 22% to more than Rmb100 billion or about $13.8 billion last year and Citigroup expects China, which has prohibited gaming after the 1949 communist revolution to become the world's second biggest lottery market by the year 2010.
More than half of the growth in 2007 came from the video lottery terminals. Video lottery terminals or VLT's are like slot machines that are given to China's welfare lottery. It is a joint collaboration between International Game Technology and China LotSynergy in Hong Kong. The deputy chief executive of CLS, Daniel Lao commented that he is expecting that lottery's next mode of growth will be keno games, which a game like bingo and can also traced its roots in China.
China LotSynergy first announced its contract with the Welfare Lottery for the nationwide keno network about three years ago. But the launched was delayed because local governments, which offer keno games from other companies, want to put their identity on the keno system.
Australia's Tabcorp, CLS's initial partner on the project, withdrew from the whole thing just last month because of impatience and was substituted by GTech, a lottery unit of Italy's Lottomatica. The initial launch will involve 2,000 VLT's that will be offered in eight provinces in China, with another 2,000 machines following it up.
The country's video lottery terminal network has grown since 2005 to 22,077 machines with a daily average of 1.5 video lottery machines starting each day. The VLT's produced Rmb4.5 billion, a quarter of the total lottery sales.
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John Sullivan
