New competition forces Vietnamese traditional lottery to raise prize

January 05, 2017 | 18:37

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Traditional lottery companies in the South have raised their maximum prize to VND2 billion ($88,260) since January 1, from the previous VND1.5 billion ($66,195), in an effort to compete with Viet Nam Lottery Company (Vietlott).

Vietnam’s traditional lotteries are said to be losing their shine since Vietlott’s Mega 6/45 has been offering computerised lottery with much higher jackpot prizes.

In Vietlott’s January 1 drawing, a lucky winner took a jackpot of nearly VND49 billion ($2.1 million). This is almost 25 times as much as the new increased top prize offered by traditional lottery companies.

Yet the VND49 billion ($2.1 million) jackpot was the smallest of Vietlott's eight jackpots in the two months since mid-October. Notably, on Christmas Day, two winners split VND159 billion ($7.02 million), the largest to date.

By comparison, during the whole of 2016, the two lotteries similar to Mega 6/45 offered in the US, Mega Millions and Powerball, only had nine and eight jackpot winners, respectively. In 2015, eight people claimed the jackpot from Mega Millions and 14 from Powerball.

The huge jackpots and the frequency with which they were won seems to have boosted the popularity of computerised lottery among Vietnamese customers. Vietlott reported a 2016 revenue of VND1.6 trillion ($70.6 million). This is the highest annual revenue since the company’s establishment in 2011. In a recent interview with newspaper Zing.vn, officials of traditional lottery companies claimed that Mega 6/45's popularity has negatively affected their sales.

Last January, Vietlott signed an exclusive 18-year contract with Malaysian conglomerate Berjaya to launch computerised lottery games in Vietnam.

The odds of winning the jackpot of Vietlott's popular Mega 6/45 game are only 1 out of 8 million—lower than the odds of being struck by lightning.

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