U.S.-listed firm Entertainment Gaming Asia’s (EGA) Dreamworld casino in Pailin province has seen revenue drop by almost 18 percent this year, according to financial results released by the company.
Results issued on Thursday from Hong Kong said the casino, which opened in May 2012, made revenue of $907,000 from April to June, compared with revenue of $1.1 million in the first quarter of this year.
“The decline was due to lower player traffic levels,” said a statement accompanying the results.
The casino houses 26 live gaming tables and 58 slot machine seats.
Operating costs fell slightly during the three-month period, but were still above revenues at $1.2 million for the quarter up to the end of June. That compares to $1.3 million in operating costs spent during the previous quarter.
EGA, which also operates slot machines within the NagaWorld casino in Phnom Penh and Thansur Bokor in Kampot province, opened a 300-seat slot hall in Poipet City, Banteay Meanchey province, in May this year. The company has also announced plans for a new casino in Kampot.
The company is listed on the NASDAQ Capital Market in New York and is backed by Macau-based Melco International development.
According to a transcript of a conference call with analysts last week, chairman and chief executive of EGA Clarence Chung said the Pailin venture, the company’s first casino development, was “a valuable learning experience with relatively low capital [impact].”
“The challenges we have faced…has provided us a firm understanding of this market and we are proactively doing steps to enhance earning potential for these projects,” he said.
In response to the losses, the company plans to remove some live-gaming tables from the Pailin casino, and reach out to more junket operators, who bring groups of big-spending gamers to casinos.
Mr. Chung said he was confident the Poipet project—a hall of gaming machines attached to an existing casino—would be a success. “With eight existing casinos in operation, Poipet is an established and growing regional gaming market,” he said, according to the transcript.
Chief of the Pailin provincial administration’s Cabinet, Sao Sarat, said he was not aware of any fall in the number of visitors to the five casino’s in the town, which cater to gamers from Thailand, where gambling is illegal. “They [the casinos] still make a profit,” he said. “I am not concerned that they will move their business from our province.”
Poipet City governor Ngor Meng Chruon also said he thought the casino industry was healthy in the city. “I don’t know abut their revenues, but the customers are coming to visit those casinos as normal,” he said.
According to EGA’s results, the firm’s gaming machines in NagaWorld, Phnom Penh’s only licensed casino, contributed $3.7 million to revenue between April and June, which totaled $5.8 million in the period.
The results said revenues from gaming machines in the Thansur Bokor casino—which is situated in one of three hotel casinos being built on Kampot’s Bokor mountain by well-known businessman Sok Kong’s Sokimex Corporation—declined by an undisclosed amount.
In Cambodia as a whole, the company’s gaming machines earned $169 per unit per day between April and June, down from $215 during the same period in 2012.
