PAGCOR's e-Games café hints investment prospects

In an effort to expand their casino games offerings, the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corporation (PAGCOR) has ventured outside their land-based Casino Filipino branches as it now offered business opportunity to investors via the management of its growing e-Games stations.

PAGCOR has partnered with PhilWeb Corp., a technology enabler to put up e-Games stations, an entertainment center similar to an Internet Café all over the country that is dedicated for the use of playing e-games through a virtual casino.

Since December, the government-owned corporation and its partner have already opened 21 e-Games cafés nationwide which defines the growing demand for online gaming in the country, said Philweb Corporation senior manager for Internet casino station Mark Allan de Ungria in an interview.

Ungria said that e-Games café offer an enormous and lucrative business opportunity since more and more people are betting on lottery and other games of chance to increase their financial resources to cope with the country’s current difficult economic situation.

An e-Games Station is a virtual casino that caters to players who do not have online access, but want to play in a comfortable and private setting, said Ungria.

He discussed that this internet casino business venture is currently being offered to individual investors and business entities that owns properties or locations that are ideal for this kind of operation.

He said that such establishment must be located in a commercial and high trafficked area and must be at least 200 meters away from any school or church establishments as persons below 21 years old are not allowed to play.

He said that they require no franchise fee and its start-up capital is pegged between P1.2 million and P1.5 million but monthly revenue is 28 percent of casino win and reimbursement takes 12 months.

Pagcor e-Games station opens 24 hours daily and offers at least 120 games and about 39 percent of these are slots, 20 percent are video poker games and 13 percent are table card games.

PhilWeb’s website reported that for the first half of this year, they have tallied an un-audited net income of P149.6 million, up by 78 percent from P84.2 million during the same period last year while its revenues grew 34 percent from last year to a total of P171.4 million.

This growth improvement was attributed to the PAGCOR e–Games café systems handled by the company. – Rhia de Pablo