Pagcor sees P60-B to P65-B gross revenues by yearend

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MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (Pagcor) is seen to earn around P60 billion to P65 billion in gaming revenues by December despite a “bad start” of the year, its chairperson disclosed Wednesday.

Pagcor chair Atty. Andrea Domingo said they have earned around P17 billion so far this year. The corporation’s gross gaming revenue (GGR) is expected to reach P25 billion to P30 billion by June.

“Despite the bad start of the year in January and February, right now we are hitting our targets and from what I see, as of April we’ve already made about P17 billion,” Domingo said during the Kapihan sa Manila Bay forum.

“So we’ll have two months more until I end my term and I think we should be hitting anywhere from P25 billion to P30 billion by June. So it would be possible that by the end of the year, Pagcor would have about P60 billion to P65 billion a year GGR which is almost twice as much as last year,” she added.

According to Domingo, Pagcor has also contributed P6 billion in advance dividends to the national government to aid in the pandemic response.

“The President no longer asked us for any socio-economic projects funds for this year because he said that we should just give it all to the National Treasury which is what we did,” Domingo said.

Domingo attributed the “bad start” of the year to the surge that happened due to the Omicron variant of COVID-19, prompting some casinos to temporarily suspend operations due to alert level restrictions.

Nonetheless, despite the pandemic, Domingo said Pagcor still had a “positive bottomline” in 2020 and 2021.

“When our revenues retracted, we also cut all of our expenses. Bottomline is we still made more than about P100 million—I think about P183 million [in 2020] and last year also we made over P100 million still without laying off our people,” Domingo said.

/MUF