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Today’s Britons may chatter of double-dip downturns and quantitative easing as casually as they dissect the Premier League or The X Factor, but in the casino sector there is little sign of a serious slowdown. Indeed, Aspers Group is about to open the country’s largest venue, a 65,000-square-foot development in the new Westfield Stratford City shopping centre, near the site of the 2012 Olympics.
Attracting new or less confident players appears to be a priority for Aspers, with the gaming floor offering 92 betting terminals where customers can play table games electronically, as well as 150 slots.
Most likely, many visitors taking advantage of those will have also been lured to Stratford City by its other leisure facilities such as retail, dining, cinema, bowling and hotels: this is most unlikely to be an exclusive, high-roller-oriented venue.
The casino, opening in December, will also have 40 conventional tables offering standards such as American roulette, blackjack and punto banco; a 150-seater poker room; and a 60-seat betting area in the sports bar.
And Aspers is not the only operator investing in Britain. Rank’s Grosvenor unit, for example, continues to roll out its G brand, with a mix of new sites and revamps. Latest is the Grosvenor G Casino Stockton, a 21,000-square-foot venue with 13 tables, 26 terminals and a 100-seat poker room as well as slots.
Casinos are beneficiaries of overall recovery in the British betting and gaming sector, although much of that is thanks to strong performance by the National Lottery and remote gambling.
The sector was worth £8.86bn in fiscal 2010, according to market researcher Key Note. That represented a slight rise on 2009’s £8.72bn, following a precipitous 12.2 per cent plunge in 2008-9.
The National Lottery, at £5.82bn, and remote gaming fared best – but this was at the expense of other markets such as Bingo, football pools and bookmakers.
Key Note predicts “small but consistent growth” in the next five years, with total spending on betting and gaming reaching £9.87bn ($16bn) in 2015. Next year’s Rugby World Cup and Olympics, as well as the 2014 Commonwealth Games, will add impetus.
And the optimistic outlook for gaming is consistent with other research suggesting that most British consumer and leisure businesses are expecting their turnover to improve over the next year much faster than the economy as a whole.
A survey by private-equity firm ECI Partners found that 76 per cent expect to see turnover rise by more than six per cent, while a third predicted an increase of more than 20 per cent.
By contrast, the British Chambers of Commerce expects that gross domestic product (GDP) will climb only 2.1 per cent in 2012. Casino operators like Aspers and Grosvenor, however, will be looking for a much sharper rise as consumers undaunted by financial doomsaying try a little quantitative easing of their own in new venues.
