NewsWhore
11-29-2010, 04:20 PM
Poor lottery and "quiniela" ticket sales due to recently introduced changes are dragging the National Lottery ticket hawkers to bankruptcy. Even the very administrator of the National Lottery recognizes that the agency has been left behind when it comes to innovations. Diario Libre interviewed ticket wholesaler Felix Severino as he looks inside a cardboard box full of papers, as if he was trying to pull out some reason for the losses in his business. The papers are no more than hundreds of lottery tickets and "quiniela" slips (the "quiniela" is a play on the last two numbers of the 1st, 2nd or 3rd prize of the Lottery) belonging to the National Lottery drawing from the week before that Severino could not sell, because according to what he says - the same as other colleagues - "they are not attractive for the players. "I lost more than RD$100,000 this week, because I had to play quinielas and lottery tickets that they would not take back", said Severino, one of the five wholesale distributors of the Lottery. They all say that the losses in sales amount to around a million pesos for the wholesalers. The administrator of the National Lottery, Enrique Martinez, has admitted the low demand for lottery tickets and quinielas on several occasions, and attributes this fall in demand to the fact that past administrations did not implement the necessary innovations.
The sales of Lottery products used to average some seven million pesos a month, according to data from last year. In total, the sales report of quinielas and lottery tickets reached RD$78,882,518 for all of 2009, a number that barely represents 20% of the income the agency handled that year, which was RD$1,423,942,341. The rest of the money, some RD$1.248 billion came from the collections of taxes on betting parlors (the ubiquitous "bancas") and the electronic lotteries that operate in the country. The amount sold in quinielas and lottery tickets is not enough, in fact, to cover the lottery's own prizes, since the money paid out over the last 12 months was RD$129,510,656, some RD$50 million more than was sold. This amount includes the prizes paid out from 16 August 2009 until 10 October of this year, of which RD$98,281,402 were paid to players of lottery tickets and the remaining RD$31,229,254 were paid to quiniela winners.
More... (http://www.dr1.com/index.html#8)
The sales of Lottery products used to average some seven million pesos a month, according to data from last year. In total, the sales report of quinielas and lottery tickets reached RD$78,882,518 for all of 2009, a number that barely represents 20% of the income the agency handled that year, which was RD$1,423,942,341. The rest of the money, some RD$1.248 billion came from the collections of taxes on betting parlors (the ubiquitous "bancas") and the electronic lotteries that operate in the country. The amount sold in quinielas and lottery tickets is not enough, in fact, to cover the lottery's own prizes, since the money paid out over the last 12 months was RD$129,510,656, some RD$50 million more than was sold. This amount includes the prizes paid out from 16 August 2009 until 10 October of this year, of which RD$98,281,402 were paid to players of lottery tickets and the remaining RD$31,229,254 were paid to quiniela winners.
More... (http://www.dr1.com/index.html#8)