PhilWeb sets new profit records

MANILA, Philippines - PhilWeb Corp., the Philippines’ first listed Internet company, announced that core net income for the second quarter of 2009 totaled P122.9 million, a 128-percent growth versus the same quarter last year and a record for the company.

Total net income for the first half of the year reached P227.6 million, which PhilWeb president Dennis Valdes pointed out is almost equal to the total core net income for the entire year 2008 of P231.6 million.

“Our growth pace continues to accelerate as we open more of our Pagcor e-Games cafés,” Valdes said. “We just opened our 150th café. The 29 we opened over the first half of 2009 represent a faster opening rate than last year, when we opened a total of 45 for the entire year.”

To further accelerate growth, Valdes said Pagcor is introducing a new e-Games logo that will clearly earmark all of the Pagcor e-Games (PEGS) Cafés distinctively versus other Pagcor outlets. “The new e-Games logo is already being installed in all our existing cafés and in the new ones that will be opened soon,” Valdes continued.

“Other marketing efforts for the Pagcor e-Games cafés have been intensified, so much so that the average daily casino win has been increasing steadily for the past 18 months,” explained Valdes.

“In our 2008 annual report, we wrote that the record daily casino win for all 2008 was P8.14 million, set on Dec. 26, 2008. This record has been broken several times, in fact, just about every two weeks, with the latest record being a casino win of P10.8 million for June 26, 2009.”

“June 2009 was historically the best performing month in the history of PhilWeb,” said Valdes. “All our three business segments performed well, with the Internet sports bettings stations and mobile gaming businesses also achieving their targets for the month. Of course, PEGS was still the driving force, generating records in three categories – bet volume of P6.29 billion, casino win of P234 million, and casino win margin of 3.7 percent. We are confident that these trends will only get better, as PhilWeb has traditionally always had a stronger second half of the year compared to the first.”