Portugal: Casinos pessimistic about 2021 after 50% fall in takings last year
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Portuguese casinos face 2021 with pessimism, after a historic drop of almost 50% in takings in 2020, given the new closure period and the change in the habits of gamblers to other gaming offers.
“With regard to the year now beginning, we cannot face it with optimism. The pandemic is far from over, new confinement is expected and other periods of closure cannot be excluded throughout the year, and restrictions on opening hours are expected to continue, with further decreases in frequency and further erosion of revenues”, the Portuguese casino association said on Thursday.
According to the association, “even if it were to happen, a control of the pandemic would have very slow effects on the re-establishment of the frequency of physical casinos, given the change in the habits of the visitors that is inevitably taking place”.
It said that if physical casinos “were already facing increasingly aggressive competition, both from online casino games and from the physical and online games of Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa (especially Placard, Scratch and Euromillions)”, in a pandemic environment “this competition has intensified”.
This is because the physical casinos were closed “for almost 30% of the year” and because “even with them open, many customers started to prefer games that do not imply their presence in public”.
According to the association, this whole situation has led to an “abrupt decrease” to half of the takings of national casinos last year, which (considering the revenues from the operation of vending machines and games on the bench, such as poker or roulette) ended with a drop of 49.9% compared to 2019, a total of close to €157.9 million, compared to €315.2 million in 2019.
“The characteristics of physical casino operations changed profoundly in 2020, following the Covid-19 pandemic. Successive declarations of a state of emergency and calamity have led to the total closure of the casinos for more than two and a half months, from 14 March until the beginning of June, and their operation from that month onwards has been successively interrupted by new closure obligations on certain days”, the association said.
And even after their opening to the public since June, the association noted that casinos have been operating “in less profitable daily periods as they had to close at 8:00 p.m., currently at 10:00 p.m., when previously the daily operation took place until 3:00 a.m., with the most profitable hours taking place from 11:00 p.m.”.
In addition, the offer of games “also had to decrease substantially in order to create conditions to maintain the physical distance between customers to meet conditions to keep the casinos open to the public”.
Of the 11 casinos in Portugal for which the association has data (it lacks information on Casino de S. Miguel in the Azores), those in Lisbon and Estoril recorded the biggest drop in gross revenues in 2020: Casino de Lisboa, which leads the country in gaming volume, with a 24.3% share, closed the year down by 54.6% compared to 2019, to €38.4 million, while Estoril’s casino turnover was almost €30 million, down 52.2%.
Taking the three Algarve casinos operated by the Solverde group as a whole, the drop in revenue was close to 46.5%, with turnover falling from €35.4 million in 2019 to less than €19 million in 2020.
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused at least 1,979,596 deaths as a result of more than 92.3 million cases of infection worldwide, according to the French agency AFP.
In Portugal, 8,236 have people died out of 507,108 confirmed cases of infection, according to the most recent health authority (DGS) bulletin.
