Alejandro Tengco, chairman and CEO of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (PAGCOR), says the agency is on track to sell its 41 casino assets starting in 2025. The sale is expected to be complete by the time President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. reaches the end of his term, in 2028.
In the next two years, PAGCOR will work to enhance the value of the assets to reap the maximum return. Speaking at G2E in Las Vegas last week, Tengco said that includes the delivery of more than 3,000 new slot machines starting in January 2024.
As reported by Inside Asian Gaming, Tengco said the slots could generate up to US$316 million in additional revenue before the casinos are sold.
“Our ongoing modernization will also help increase the value of our properties before we start selling them in late 2025, which will then be the signal of officially starting our privatization,” he said.
“Privatization will take some time,” he added, “which is why we must optimize our casino operations in the meantime to attract more players and to continue generating revenues for PAGCOR’s nation-building programs.
“We have already reached an agreement with our suppliers for a revenue-sharing scheme for these new machines for which PAGCOR will generate the lion’s share, so to speak.”
Along with the new machines, PACOR plans to “modernize” its table games, investing in a “new and more sophisticated table games management system to inject more life in our casinos,” Tengco said in Las Vegas. In addition, the regulator is “procuring a system for our online platform, which we will call casinofilipino.com.” The online casino will introduce PAGCOR to the “very lucrative and very profitable online market,” he said.
“In the end, all of these efforts will enhance the value of PAGCOR’s properties so that we can sell them at a better price … Once we become a pure regulator and we have established a level playing field which is more predictable and more in line with global best practices, we expect to see an influx of new investments in the Philippine gaming industry.
“The ultimate goal for us is to make the Philippines the gold standard, the epicenter of gaming in the Asia-Pacific region.”
Tengco previously stated that PAGCOR hopes to generate US$1.41 billion from the sale of the casinos, including nine that operate under the Casino Filipino brand and 32 that operate as satellites in venues leased from third parties.
The selloff came in response to years of criticism from lawmakers who said PAGCOR could not ethically serve as both a gaming regulator and a casino operator. Tengco recently commented that his administration, appointed by Marcos after his 2022 election, “has more than enough time to accomplish our goals of being more dynamic, more profitable and more focused as a purely regulatory corporation.”
