No bidders yet
Private-sector businesses looking to run a casino are in luck in the Philippines. The government-owned gaming regulator, the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp., which also serves as an operator, is preparing to sell off its casino assets.
The timeline to do so is within the calendar year, reports GGRAsia. But so far, Finance Secretary Carlos Dominguez has not yet had any expressions of interest.
“It’s better for the government to move out of casino operations,” Dominguez told the Philippine Inquirer. “It will remove the conflict of interest when you are the regulator. Personally, I haven’t gotten offers because the authorities haven’t set out the terms of the privatization.
“You have to set out the terms, then people will come. Of course, we will make it attractive since we do want to raise the revenues from this and remove the conflict that’s ongoing and existing,” he added.
PAGCOR directly operates a number of state-run casinos and oversees others in the private sector. Its Casino Filipino brand operates venues in eight locations across the country and also 36 satellite properties across the Philippines. According to PAGCOR, its casinos operated nearly a third of all table games in the nation’s market in late 2016 and nearly six of every 10 electronic gaming machines including 565 gaming tables and 10,271 EGMs at Casino Filipino locations.
In the first nine months of 2016, PAGCOR-operated casinos recorded gross gaming revenues of PHP23.88 billion (US$478.9 million), up 5.7 percent year-on-year period, according to official data. Nationwide casino GGR for the period, including revenues from the private casino sector, rose 19.8 percent to PHP99.77 billion.
The regulator currently runs a total of 46 casino properties nationwide and is required by law to give half of its annual gross earnings to the Bureau of the Treasury for community and social projects, according to the Asia Gaming Brief.
