Securities firm JPMorgan Securities (Asia Pacific) said casino firm Kangwon Land’s earnings normalisation “shows no signs of a turnaround” and appeared unlikely more than a year after it resumed following restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kangwon Land Inc. is a promoter of Kangwon Land (pictured), the only Korean casino resort that allows Koreans to gamble.

“The recovery has been significantly slower since the May 2022 reopening,” analysts DS Kim and Mufan Shi wrote in a note on Thursday.

They added: “The VIP trend remains at 50% of pre-Covid levels, and although it has returned to around 100% levels, the bulk recovery is also disappointing considering 20% capacity expansion (i.e., a 10% increase in both operating hours and the number of bulk tables).”

“We initially thought this was only a matter of time, but we were disappointed to see a third consecutive quarter of declining demand,” the brokerage said. “Our confirmation indicates that traffic levels at Kangwon Land Casino did not differ significantly in Q1 and Q2,” the analysts said, adding that they did not expect an “inflection point in the near term.”

Kangwon Land reported net income of 101.54 billion won (currently US$80.2 million) for shareholders in the first quarter of 2023, up 7.0% from the previous quarter.

In Thursday’s note, JP Morgan said Kangwon Land’s slow pace of business recovery was “puzzling.”

The “all other major gaming jurisdictions” the agency follows, including Las Vegas, Singapore, the Philippines and foreign-only casinos in South Korea, were due to “continued increase in demand from 100% to 130% of pre-COVID-19 levels in about a year after reopening.”

Kim and Si said, “The slow recovery of Kangwon Land is suspected to be related to illegal/gray market gambling in Korea (such as so-called ‘hold dumps’ or cash games at online casinos).”

They added: “This leaves us with less hope for an ‘inflection point’ of a shift in demand, at least until we see meaningful results from the crackdown on illegal gambling.”

Casino companies have posted “lower profits,” with higher taxes and operating costs, according to the broker.

“We are modeling our gaming revenue to remain around 95% of pre-COVID-19 levels, meaning we will be much less profitable than before,” the JP Morgan team said.

Raising the game tax from 2021 could erode Kangwon Land’s revenue by “about 10%,” and staff costs “up 10% to 15%” compared to 2019 represent more than 10% of pre-COVID revenue.

JPMorgan estimates Kangwon Land’s second-quarter revenue fell 5.9% sequentially to about W337 billion.

BY: 홀짜게임