600 new lotto, keno terminals rolling out nationwide

MANILA, Philippines – Pacific Online Systems Corporation, the company behind the multi-million Super Lotto 6/49 grand prizes, will rollout around 600 new gaming terminals nationwide by the end of 2012, according to a company official.

Some of the terminals will be for Lotto but the majority will be for bingo-type gambling game Keno, which the company considers as its growth market.

“It’s [Keno] a new game so it has grown double digits from last year so we expect more than double this year… (It’s about) novelty. It’s new so it has not reached maturity,” said the company’s executive vice president Carmelita Chan. 

“The lotto game is there. It’s always been there so it is a stable mature market,” she stressed. 

She pegged the current number of terminals at “2,000 Lotto and 400 Keno.” That means the additional terminals will increase their portfolio by 30%.

Company CFO Rhederick B. Inciong put the cost of each terminal at P200,000. 

Of the 600 to be deployed this 2012, Inciong said “300 arrived last year so half have already been booked as a capital investment.”

He said the remaining 300 would make up the majority of their at least P100 million capital expenditure for the year. 

Financial performance

Net income in 2011 dropped 9% to P392.1 million from P430.3 million in 2010, which was an extraordinary year with the jackpot reaching P750 million and driving growth.

“If there is no winner, it adds to the pot and that is the primary driver of growth in the business,” added Inciong.

In the first quarter of 2012, Chan said net income plummeted 34% to P95.5 million. In the same period last year, the company posted P144.9 million.

Yet despite the contraction in net income, Chan forecast that revenues and net income would both grow 10% to 15%.

“I believe that P750 million jackpot is a blip. If you will notice we are really steadily growing more than 10% a year, with or without that we expect some growth,” she said.

“With the increased roll out of the terminals, they will be more accessible to the buying public. If it is within reach there will be more sales,” said Chan.

She also said they would try to offer more novelty. “In our scratch games we plan to give more variance and we are coming up with plans to have more draws for the PCSO Lotto meaning that instead of having a draw once a week, PCSO might have draws twice a week for the same game,” added the company’s executive vice president. – Rappler.com