Yahoo Finance Mecca Bingo goes after the student pound as visitor numbers drop
Bingo operator Rank is looking to put the clickety-click back into its venues with trials of student nights and the launch of a new brand after visitor numbers fell.
The number of customer visits to its Mecca bingo sites dropped 9pc to 10.5m in the year to June 30, knocking sales in the division even though the amount each person spent rose above £20.
Chief executive Henry Birch said Mecca was looking to reach a new audience by trialling three different event formats aimed at students, 18-30-year olds and 25-45-year olds respectively and that the early results had been positive.
“The challenge will be how repeatable the business to these nights is, as we’re likely to get a student coming once a month or once a quarter but not every single night,” Mr Birch said.
“But it would not take too much of a success to have a discernible impact on our numbers.”
Mr Birch said that even though bingo had been in decline, Mecca remained a large business with more than £200m in revenues and was highly cash generative.
Rank is also hopeful that is new brand Luda, which opened its first site in Walsall this month, could reinvigorate interest in bingo venues.
Luda will be bingo-led but offer a coffee and bar as well as slots and arcade games. Rank is looking to place the brand in town centres with high footfall. Mr Birch said two more were due to open in Leeds and Weston-super-Mare by early next year and that if the sites proved successful, he would “roll out the concept rapidly”.
During the year, Rank's Grosvenor casinos business was hit by rules that demand more stringent checks on customers to help identify money laundering and problem gambling, and the fact punters won more money than in the prior year.
Customer visits fell 5pc to 7.7m knocking sales by 3pc to £397m.
In spite of the tough conditions for Rank's retail estate, digital revenue rocketed 15pc to £111m, lifting total turnover by 1pc to £754m for the year to June 30. Pre-tax profits dropped nearly 7pc to £79.7m but this was largely because a £10m gain from property sales last year not repeated in this period.
Mr Birch was tentatively upbeat regarding the Government’s ongoing triennial review into the gambling sector. He said a simple quirk of history meant some of its venues were only allowed 20 slot machines in because the licence on those sites was linked to 1968 legislation and not a more recent Act from 2005.
But he thought there could be “an outside chance” the rules of both licences could be harmonised, potentially meaning it could put more machines in its casinos.
