Article by LocusPlay
Mobile Lottery… a Hype or Reality?
24 March 2014
If you are a lottery operator then probably this is not the first time you are reading or have come across something about mobile lottery.
I am sure you would wonder that is it some kind of a hype that is created by technology providers or is it a reality or soon going to be reality. Let’s explore this phenomenon together both from a lottery op-erator’s as well from a player’s perspective.
I am neither going to bombard you with facts and figures nor going to quote references of any re-search finding. Instead, I am taking you with my individual experience and my interactions with people and players associated with lottery. Off late, I have experienced that mobile lottery is becoming a de-facto discussion point whenever I happen to meet either a lottery provider, a supplier, a consult-ant or even a player. I guess everybody wants to follow what they think is the direction where lottery technology is heading to, but I have seen less initia-tives towards implementing or making it a reality. You would wonder why is it so?
Majorly, there are two types of lotteries, or say rather three types. The first type is the one in de-veloped countries like US, UK etc., where either laws prohibit mobile lottery or they are already ahead of the game. The second type is the one in emerging markets like Caribbean, Africa etc., where lottery is still paper based with some of them adopt-ing to technology lately, mainly for their retail operations. The third and most interesting type is the one that is going to start or a startup lottery. Let’s talk about the second and the third type as they are not very big compared to the state lotteries
in the US or a national lottery in the UK, but they have a huge potential to beat the market in terms of growth rate.
The lotteries that mainly run paper based operation have a modest but steady growth rate, but they find it difficult to keep the cost of operations down due to two reasons – high inflation and ever increasing winning payouts. Some of such lotteries are seri-ously exploring the ways to go mobile as that not only brings them back on high growth track but also helps them bring down the operations cost significantly. Mobile lottery will fetch them a seg-ment of players that is not comfortable going to a retail outlet and buy a lottery due to several obvious reasons. This is really a big segment in the emerg-ing market, which many lotteries have ignored so far. This is the growth that I would be very much interested into. This will not only bring more money across the table but will also account for a much larger spend on per ticket transaction.
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Article by LocusPlay
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The third type – new or startup lottery, are they willing to start with just retail based operation and invest heavily just to be “one more” player in the market? The other serious aspect for them to con-sider is that they are up against an established lot-tery player who has deep pockets. Mobile lottery is the right strategy for them for multiple reasons. They need to be innovative and the first one to bring a change when they are competing with the established lotteries. They need to look for a mar-ket segment that is not captured by their competitors. Who does not know a better way to do this when the competitor is still complacent? Last but not the least, they need to keep both the capital investment as well the cost of operations in check with the fact that they have to offer better winning
payout than their competitor. They have the right opportunity to catch others napping by launching mobile lottery with a significantly lower capital investment and lower cost of marketing. This is a big market where traditional lotteries are still under the belief that disruption is impossible.
There are for sure a few innovative thinkers in both the types of lottery that I have explained earlier. But for them, the biggest question is still unan-swered to a greater extent. Is there an availability of a genuine technology for mobile lottery? Is it really a “so-called” low capex initiative?
- Rahuldev Rajguru
Co-founder & CEO
To learn more about mobile lottery technology, visit us at www.locusplay.com!
