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Empire Resorts loses $58M in first 5 months of business
The state’s largest new casino has crapped out — losing $58 million in its first five months of operation.
Empire Resorts, which operates Resorts World Catskills and a smaller casino at Monticello Raceway, just revealed the losses in its quarterly filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The company, which opened the $1.2 billion Catskills casino near Monticello in February, also reported $462 million in long-term debts at both of its facilities as of June 30.
Critics had warned that the upstate gambling market was oversaturated when the state first authorized four new non-Indian casinos through a referendum in 2013 — and say these new figures prove it was a lousy bet from the get-go.
“I told you so,” said Gary Greenberg, an investor in the upstate Vernon Downs racino.
“Cuomo’s casino policy is a failure. It was a serious blunder by the governor.”
MGM is opening a flashy new casino over the border in Massachusetts next week — further diluting the gambling customer base — while New Jersey is now offering sports betting as New York dawdles.
Net-win revenues at the racino have dropped nearly in half, from $1 million a week to $550,000, since the new casinos arrived, Greenberg said.
None of the four new gambling halls are meeting their revenue projections — Resorts is expected to take in $150 million this year, well below the original estimate of $250 million.
And it was considered the marquee gaming facility of the quartet because it’s closest to New York City, so the slump is an especially bad sign, said another expert.
“The numbers at the Catskills casino are pretty ominous,” said University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley professor Clyde Barrow, who published a study warning that those projections were inflated.
“It’s doubly troubling because when a casino first opens you get the curiosity effect, with a rush of people showing up. You did not get that with the Catskills facility.”
Barrow said Cuomo’s goal was to create jobs in depressed areas upstate — but that only works if a casino has a captive audience and is not competing with other betting dens in the same region.
“Now you have casinos at every street corner,” he said.
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