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Sports lottery ready to be launched next month

Taiwan will launch a sports lottery next month and the government will use the proceeds to develop sports and improve the lives of the handicapped, an official said yesterday.

“We will launch a sports lottery on May 2. In the initial stage, we will introduce betting on local and overseas baseball, basketball and soccer,” Richard Yang (楊瑞東), vice president of the Taipei Fubon Bank (台北富邦銀行), said in an interview with Broadcasting Corp of China.

Fubon Bank is in charge of issuing the sports lottery.

Yang said Taiwan’s sports lottery would start with betting on 2,000 games a year, but would need to cover 6,000 games a year to make profits.

“We will cover US baseball, basketball and European soccer games. As European soccer games are played Saturday evening, which is Saturday night in Taiwan, we will also have Japanese and South Korean soccer games so that on Sunday, we also have games to bet on,” he said.

The betting can go on for 22 hours a day every day throughout the year.

The sports lottery is expected to yield an estimated NT$1.07 billion (US$354 million) in revenue for this year, Yang said. The annual revenue should grow to NT$30 billion by the start of next year, he predicted.

Taipei Fubon also operated the country’s public welfare lottery for five years until 2006. Taiwan launched the public welfare lottery in 2000 to benefit the disabled by allowing them to sell lottery tickets but decided to launch sports gambling to use the proceeds to promote sports and stimulate the economy.

Half of the bank’s 200 designated retailers will begin selling sports lottery tickets on the first day, Yang said, adding that the number of designated retailers will have increased to 1,000 by June.

In addition, the bank will inaugurate an online betting system in mid-June, Yang said.

Citing the examples of Hong Kong and Singapore, Yang noted that the online system is expected to contribute 40 percent of the total revenue once people learned how to place bets on the Internet or via telephone.

In the first year, however, retailers will still account for the bulk of the revenue, he said.

Saying that the online system will not eat into retailers’ profits, Yang explained that each of the 1,000 retailers is expected to generate some NT$18 million on average, which is higher than the average profit of NT$11 million posted by the bank’s previous public lottery ticket retailers.

In the initial stage, the sports lottery will focus on NBA basketball and Major League Baseball in the US, as well as on the Union of European Football Associations, according to Yang.

The lottery will also cover local baseball and basketball, Yang said, adding that local residents will be allowed to bet on local baseball games beginning in mid-August.


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