Temporary Cyprus Casino Attracts Nearly Half a Million Guests

Three casinos in the Republic of Cyprus run by Melco International Development managed to draw approximately a half million guests till January. Local residents made up 4/5^th of this crowd.

The temporary casino at Cyprus was opened in Limassol by Melco in June 2018. Two other satellite venues have been opened in Nicosla and the Larnaca airport since then. Melco’s main gaming venue planned for Cyprus – the 550m pound City of Dreams Mediterranean, has its construction ongoing. The venue is looking at a public opening by 2021.

Cypriot Gaming and Casino Supervision Commission released figures which stated that nearly 470k guests had visited Melco’s three operational gambling venues all through January. Cypriots made up the majority chunk of the crowd i.e. around 80%, 4% of them were from Greece, and the remaining was visiting from other countries.

Melco managed to generate gaming revenue of 35m pounds after its guests gambled around 210m pounds during their visits. The state collected 4m pounds in licensing fee and deducted 5.25m pounds in taxes.

Melco’s casinos received some more positive news earlier in the month when cops in the island’s two British Sovereign Base Areas (SBA) decided to close all illegal casinos in operation in the locality. Initially, when the SBA had started its crackdown on illegal casinos in 2014, there had been nine casinos. Now, the SBA has tried out these operators with their persistence and the operators are giving in to the SBA’s demands.

A closer look at the numbers

The Cyprus National Betting Authority (NBA) has reported that the licensed land-based and online betting operators were able to generate total revenue of 89.2m pounds in 2018 which showed a 17% gain from the former year’s earnings. It recognized eight licensed land-based bookmakers and 11 online betting licensees by the end of 2018. The NBA did come out and clarify that two of these operations had temporarily shut shop of their own volition for the time being.

A total of 60.4m pounds were roped in as land-based betting revenue last year. The figure was up 22.2% from 2017. Online revenue improved by 37.2% to amount to 28.8m pounds. The NBA, for its part, did everything possible to step up its online operator’s earnings. It blocked upwards of 4,100 unauthorized gambling domains in 2018 itself. The number exceeded the total number of domains it had gone after in the previous three years combined.