Acer-GTech team awarded lottery program contract

TaipeiBank (台北銀行) announced on Sunday that a Taiwan-US joint venture won a partnership bid for the bank's computerized lottery program, a Chinese-language newspaper reported yesterday.

The Lottery Technology Service Co (樂彩公司), a joint venture between Taiwan's Acer Group and US-based GTech Group, beat four other competitors and won the right to provide technical assistance to the bank's computerized lottery business.

Acer holds a 56 percent stake in the NT$500 million joint venture while GTech has the remaining 44 percent stake.

Jesse Ding (丁予康), president of TaipeiBank, said the bank has decided to award a five-year contract to Lottery Technology to help the bank launch the lottery business, which is slated to begin on Jan. 25 next year.

With ticket prices set at NT$50 and NT$100, the odds of winning are between one in 100 and five in 100, the paper said.

Indeed the new business is expected to be good news for the government as the twice-a-week lottery is expected to generate an estimated revenue of between NT$48 billion and NT$64 billion in the first year, and around NT$150 billion over the next five years.

The paper also said that the government plans to allocate 56 percent of the revenues to prizes, 12.8 percent to overhead expenditures, and 31.2 percent to the National Health Insurance fund and other social welfare programs.

Ding said Lottery Technology received the highest ratings for its technical and management proposals. The company also offered a lower profit rate than the other competitors, he said.