World Cup fever leaves lottery retailers out of play

Friday, 02 July 2010 15:15 Salai Han Thar San

New Delhi (Mizzima) – State lottery ticket sales have been falling since last week amid the distraction of the World Cup, forcing retailers to sell tickets at cost, merchants say.

Lottery shop owners said that they had to sell tickets without commission as most people were glued to the television watching this year’s Fifa South Africa World Cup matches. These conditions had worsened the usual low sales season during the monsoon.

“We are selling the lottery tickets at cost price from the government because of falling sales as the monsoon season and the World Cup has made business sluggish,” the sales manager at a wholesale lottery shop in Kyauktada Township told Mizzima.

A lottery shop owner in Tamwe Township described some of the methods merchants were employing to cope with the depressed market.

“We’ve had to sell some ticket combinations in letters and numbers, namely a ‘Mingalar couple’, and 10-ticket combinations, at discounts of between 400 and 500 Kyats, he said. “Even so, we still have a greater stockpile of unsold tickets in hand than we had last month.”

The government issues tickets from its offices on 27th Street, Pabedan Township, Rangoon and sells to retailers at the wholesale price of 2,000 Kyats for a stack containing 11 tickets. Retailers make up a combination of a ticket number and letter, called a “Mingalar couple”; 10, five and two-ticket combinations; and single tickets, then resell them at a premium.

The normal retail prices are 250 Kyats for a single ticket, 2,500 Kyats for a 10-ticket combination, and 5,000 Kyats for a ‘Mingalar couple’ combination. Many retailers because of the sluggish sales have had to reduce prices to 200 for a single ticket, 2,000 for a 10-ticket combination and 4,500 for a special Mingalar couple.

The government takes 40 per cent of monthly ticket sales as revenue and the remaining 60 per cent is awarded to winning ticket holders.

An expert with more than 50 years experience in the business said the government issued about 27 million tickets each month in almost 82,000 alphabetically listed stacks. Winners must encash their tickets at the Aung Bar Lay lottery office under the Ministry of Finance and Revenue but retailers usually do this work on behalf of their customers.

The office holds the draw on the first day of each month and the winning tickets must be encashed within a year or they will be forfeited to the government.

“We cannot cover our overhead expenses such as staff salaries and shop rent when we have to resell these lottery tickets at our buying price,” a retailer in Pabedan Township said.

The government has changed the price of lottery tickets five times including in 1988, when officials raised the retail price to five Kyats for a maximum prize of 500,000 Kyats. Before then, the retail price was a mere two Kyats for the top prize of 100,000 Kyats.

Prices and awards were raised again in 1991, 1998 and 2005. The last change was in January last year, after which a ticket cost 200 Kyats from a previous 100 Kyats, and the maximum award rose to 100 million Kyats.