Economic recovery halts double-digit slide in betting turnover
Hong Kong's surging economy has put a brake on plummeting betting turnover this season.
On the back of last season, when football betting, problems with the economy and various sundry nemeses of race wagering accounted for a drop of 9 per cent in the betting dollar, the first 25 meetings of the current campaign have seen it decelerate to a drop of just over 5 per cent.
Now that comparison can be challenged to some extent - this season started later than last so there is a slightly different distribution of the types of meetings - however, whether the figures are a comparison of oranges with oranges is not the point.
The general message is that anyone looking for a gloom and doom prediction for the current season may be in the wrong place and certainly is at this stage.
Sure, a 5 per cent loss is not reason to break out the champagne and begin cheering. It is still a drop and a drop which until the near double-digit levels of recent years would have been thought extremely serious.
But at least the sign is there that there may be a floor to the drop which is not a hangman's trapdoor and it is comforting that the rate has not accelerated.
Towards the finish of last season, the trend of play was towards 10-15 per cent drops meeting on meeting, which bode ill for the new season. The good news is that it hasn't happened.
It is known that Hong Kong's most successful professional punter ever is back in action after a premature retirement decision not so long ago. However, any thoughts that this punter is solely responsible for the better figures would be mistaken.
The level of play in that camp is rumoured to be well below old levels when the punter concerned would have accounted for several per cent of annual turnover by himself alone.
The club's in-house research shows that owners' areas on the track are making a greater contribution to turnover than in recent years - doubtless, like the owners' expenditure on quality new horses a matter based in the economic recovery.
Crowd figures have largely been positive for some time, which has suggested that the same level of interest is out there, just punters had become more cautious about the scale of their bets and wound them down in an unfriendly economic environment.
Perhaps the rebound in the economy has altered their thinking and allowed a lift, and that may have been enough to set the club on a path to turnover increase in the days before soccer betting became legal. That is no longer sufficient.
The alternative subject and mostly the lower tax scale applied to the three-horse race of a soccer game will continue to turn punters on to soccer betting as an 'easier' alternative, at least in their minds if not necessarily in reality.
Now the job of the Jockey Club and of government is to work hard to consolidate the work and turn that slowdown into a full blown recovery.
Perhaps the answer lies in bringing in the outside world as the club has declared its intention to do.
Sources have also indicated that the Macau-Hong Kong investment funnel is very close to completion - although what exactly the bottom-line benefit for Hong Kong will be remains an open question as the link does have the potential to simply reroute bets which are already going into the Hong Kong pools out of the SAR.
Macau might come up with some very attractive figures which mean diddly squat in terms of increases for Hong Kong.
Whatever the answer turns out to be, at least the club is now positioned in such a way that the next positive action could even make the idea of a rise in turnover less than a wild fantasy.
