Vietnam’s Royal Casino US$2.6mln loss for 2022: report

Feb 27, 2023 Newsdesk Latest News, Rest of Asia, Top of the deck  

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Royal Casino, a gaming facility in Vietnam’s Quang Ninh province, reported in 2022 a VND61-billion (US$2.6-million) financial loss, the fourth consecutive year of loss, said local news outlet VnExpress, without citing the source of the information.

The property is run by Royal International Corp, the shares of which were taken off the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange last May.

According to the Friday media report, the casino operation itself lost VND62 billion during the latest reporting period, but that was offset by “marginal profits” from hotel and resort operations at the complex, which hosts accommodation called the Royal Halong Hotel, according to its consumer website.

Royal International’s revenues were said to be up 60 percent year-on-year in 2022, at VND119 billion but down from the VND125 billion achieved in 2020.

The number of foreign visitors to the property had fluctuated amid the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the media report. International arrivals to the province as a whole were only 300,000 in 2022, compared to 5.7 million in 2019, said the news outlet. It added that Royal International had laid off nearly 100 employees last year.

The report said that in the past decade Royal International – founded in 1994 – had only been “in the black” during 2015 and 2018.

Only one casino resort in Vietnam – Corona Resort and Casino on the southern holiday island of Phu Quoc – has so far been permitted to offer gaming to economically-qualified locals. For an extended period during the pandemic, China had largely kept shut to general travellers its southern border with Vietnam, according to Australia-listed Donaco International Ltd, which runs a north-Vietnam casino-hotel at Lao Cai.

Donaco had noted recently in its fourth-quarter results, that the authorities in mainland China had “announced the full reopening of its borders and travel flow from January 2023“.

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