The Philippines' two online lottery terminals operators said on January 6th, 2010 that ticket sales went up by sixteen percent in 2009 to a little over 23 billion pesos, as more Filipinos tried their luck in the game of luck hoping to become instant millionaires.
Pacific Online Systems Corporation said that lottery sales of the PCSO (Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office) in the Visayas and Mindanao improved by 18.5% to 7.69 billion pesos last year from 6.49 billion pesos in 2008 as a result of the mass opening of terminals. At the end of 2009, the Visayas and Mindanao had 1,748 betting terminals, up from 1,500 terminals in the previous year.
Meanwhile, an official of Prime Gaming Philippines Incorporated, whose unit Prime Gaming Management Corporation, manages Luzon lottery terminals, said that sales in Luzon improved by 14.26% or 1.96 billion pesos. This corresponded to 15.7 billion pesos in sales for 2009.
Prime Gaming has more than two thousand lottery terminals in Luzon and claims a market share of nearly three quarters. Prime Gaming and Pacific Online lease lottery terminals to the state-manage PCSO under separate lease agreements and get a tenth of sales.
Willy N. Ocier, the Pacific Online chairman and president, said that the big jackpots last year further heightened the interest of the betting public thus improving the sales of PCSO. Pacific Online said that aside from lotto, sales of keno also increased by 2.7 times to 88.67 million pesos in 2009, from 32.3 million pesos in 2008.
Pacific Online possess the equipment lease agreement for the nationwide keno online roulette game through subsidiary Total Gaming Technologies. The group increased betting terminals to one hundred last year from just thirty-four terminals in 2008. Pacific Online said that there would be a significant increase in machine roll-out in 2010 to expand the reach of keno.
Pacific Online said higher lottery sales would further solidify the top line of the company. From January to September, company profits grew by eighty-five percent to 224 million pesos. For the six-month period ending October 2009, Prime Gaming reported $326 million in profits, up from $246 million in the same period in 2008.
The lottery business is expected to improve this year with the state-run PCSO's plan to phase out its power lotto offering and replace it with a game similar to three other existing lottery games.
Power lotto, which has failed to pick-up pace since its introduction last year unlike the widely popular six-digit games, will be replaced by a new six-digit game, lotto 6/55. Pacific Online had said that the new game would increase its sales by as much as twenty-five percent this year. At fifty pesos per bet, Power Lotto targets the A and B market.
The betting cost is four hundred percent bigger with the regular and Mega Lotto six-digit wagers and 150% more than the twenty pesos bet price of Super Lotto 6/49. Unlike Power Lotto where a game needs to choose the right five numbers from one to fifty-five and a sixth number from 1 to 10, customers will just have to pick six numbers from 1 to 55 in lotto 6/55.
The 6/55 lotto game will likely be sold at 20 pesos per wager, with Power Lotto's jackpot prize as the initial winning jackpot. Since Power Lotto was launched in June 2008, its jackpot has yet to be won.
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John Sullivan
