NEWTON, Mass. – Tribal gaming brought in almost a quarter of the total $93-plus billion in revenue from the gaming industry in North America last year.
All gaming revenue increased by 3.71 percent last year, but tribal gaming revenues increased by about 5 percent; and in Florida, tribal facilities increased their revenues from 2006 to 2007 by 2.3 percent to $1.6 billion.
Tribal casinos ran more than 313,000 of the 882,682 gaming machines in North America last year, and 252,254 of the total 718,848 slot machines.
The fifth edition of Casino City’s North American Gaming Almanac, the mother of all gaming almanacs, is now available and it is packed with gaming industry details and information on every aspect of the market on the continent.
The almanac is a massive 684-page, information-packed volume that provides both a complete overview and details of land-based and online gaming in the U.S. and Canada.
Published in late September by Casino City Press, the same outfit that publishes economist Alan Meister’s annual Indian Gaming Industry Report, the almanac includes market, financial, legal and regulatory information about land-based and online gaming in the U.S. and Canada. It includes profiles for each state and province, and more than 1,000 charts, tables, graphs and lists illustrate everything from revenue by gaming activity to total revenue by state to the gaming percentages of both country’s gross domestic product and per capita revenues.
Gaming facilities are ranked with top properties listed by type of gaming activity and property, and numbers of gaming positions, machines, table games and hotel rooms.
Each gaming market profile includes a market overview, net gaming revenue by type, gaming property counts, machine and table game counts and distribution, gaming property profiles by type and by location, property owner profiles, and regulatory bodies.
“The almanac is looked forward to by analysts and jurisdiction people – people who oversee the different aspects of gaming,” said Bill Riley, Casino City’s marketing manager.
The data is used by financial analysts, gaming analysts, market research consultants, casino operators, industry suppliers, regulators, libraries and universities to develop benchmarks or analyze competitors and industry trends.
The company has a full-time staff whose job is to track all the gaming information available and make thousands of updates each month, he said.
“It’s incredible. We were able to gather data almost up to a few days before printing the book.”
The almanac is available in book form and on CD. The huge amount of data can be manipulated on the CD version.
“About half of our customers buy the book and half subscribe online. We practically give away the book to the people who buy the CD or online version. The CD version has more versatility; it’s a lot more robust,” Riley said. “It’s searchable, and analysts use to search and analyze data to compare markets, for example, or one casino to another.”
The almanac includes four years of calendar-year gaming revenue by gaming activity and five-year bar charts for each gaming activity in each jurisdiction with inflation-adjusted terms as of December 2007. There are summary tables with the distribution and total numbers for types of gaming, facilities, gaming devices and gaming tables within the jurisdiction. And there are summarized lists of casino square footage, convention hall square footage, the number of rooms at casino hotels, restaurants, entertainment venues, parking spaces and even the number of employees.
An “ownership” section lists 465 gaming property owners with contact information, the names of properties owned and ownership share.
The almanac ranks North American gaming properties by various criteria such as gaming machines, table games, gaming positions, and hotel rooms with a cross-reference of properties by facility type. Information about tribal gaming is broken out separately so that researchers can analyze the Indian gaming market in the context of the total gaming industry.
An overview of revenue change, for example, shows revenues at commercial casinos and card rooms increased 7.52 percent, 5.55 percent, 8.74 percent and 5.98 percent over the last four years, while tribal gaming revenues increased 15.26 percent, 14.5 percent, 10.17 percent and 4.94 percent over the same period.
Some of the almanac’s findings across the U.S. and Canada:
• In the category of gaming facilities ranked by the number of gaming machines, Foxwoods Resort Casino and Mohegan Sun ranked first and second with 7,202 and 6,200 machines, respectively. Also in the top 10 were Pechanga Resort & Casino, with 4,900; Soaring Eagle Casinos and Resort, with 4,400; and Seneca Niagara Casino & Hotel, with 4,207.
• Canada has 13 First Nations-owned casinos, all but two of them in western Canada.
• Casino and card room gaming accounted for 47 percent of total North American gaming revenue, lotteries for 22 percent and tribal gaming for 24 percent.
• The largest inflation-adjusted growth, an increase of 3.27 percent, was seen in casino and card room gaming.
• Revenue from tribal gaming grew by 2.09 percent within the context of the total gaming revenues and by 5 percent within the tribal gaming industry from the previous years.
• Charitable gaming, lotteries and race/sports wagering experienced declines in 2007.
More information about the almanac is available at www.casinocitypress.com.
