July sales from gaming at Paradise Co Ltd, which runs foreigner-only casinos in South Korea, went up by 7.3 percent sequentially to KRW62.04 billion (US$45.17 million), the firm said in a Friday filing to the Korea Exchange. Judged year-on-year, such sales were 1.3 percent lower.
July table-games were nearly KRW57.58 billion, accounting for circa 93 percent of the overall monthly casino sales. The rest were from machine-game sales, at nearly KRW4.47 billion.
July casino drop – money exchanged for chips at the gaming table – was nearly KRW542.18 billion, up sequentially 1.9 percent, and 2.3 percent higher than a year ago.
A majority of the July casino drop was from VIP gaming, according to separate data that Paradise Co filed in its official website. In the month, the firm recorded KRW420.82 billion in casino drop for VIP play, with the remaining KRW121.35 billion being from mass play.
July VIP drop – generated via players from China, Japan, and other unspecified feeder markets – showed little change from July 2023, though last month’s tally was up by nearly 2 percent compared to June. The July mass drop was up 1.87 percent sequentially, and nearly 10.6 percent higher than a year ago, according to Paradise Co’s data set.
Chinese VIP play was the only segment to register year-on-year growth in July VIP drop.
Chinese-VIP drop in July reached nearly KRW100.93 billion, up by 31.8 percent from a year earlier. It was the second most important contributor to Paradise Co’s July VIP drop, after that of Japanese players, who logged nearly KRW223.82 billion.
Paradise Co’s casino drop for the first seven months of this year was nearly KRW3.98 trillion, a 18.0-percent improvement on the prior-year period.
Paradise Co directly operates three casino venues: Walkerhill in Seoul; Paradise Jeju on Jeju island; and a property in the port city of Busan.
It also has a venture with Japan’s Sega Sammy Holdings Inc, for the Paradise City casino resort at Incheon, near South Korea’s main airport.
