China’s online gambling market worth $97 billion

This is the claim coming out of a study just released by a Chinese university.

According to the China Center for Lottery Studies at Peking University, Chinese resident gamblers spend around 600 billion yuan (US $97 billion) each year at offshore online gambling sites.

If you think $97 billion sounds a little on the large side, you’re not alone. Below are a few gambling statistics from trusted sources that might help put this number into perspective.

Macau, the largest terrestrial casino market in the world was worth just over 360 trillion Macau Pataca, or around $44 billion in 2013.

Source: Macau Gaming Inspection and Coordination Bureau
Unit (MOP million)

This dwarfs Las Vegas casino revenues which are in the order of $6 billion (Las Vegas Strip) per year.

The entire global gambling market, including all forms (casino, sports betting, lottery, etc) via both terrestrial/traditional channels and online was estimated to be worth around $440 billion in 2013 by H2 Gambling Capital. H2 seem to be the go to source on gambling stats, relied on by the likes of the Economist, KPMG, and statista.com. They also have an estimate for the value of the global online gambling market – just under $40 billion.

Estimates of the size of any online gambling market are always going to be a little rubbery. But Peking University’s $97 billion figure, at more than twice the size of Macau, more than 10 times the size of Vegas, and more than twice the size of the size of the best guess global online gambling figure, seems on the face of it to be taking rubbery to a whole new level.

Muddying the waters even more, news site Want China Times reported this week  that,

“…a probe conducted by Peking University revealed that the money involved in online soccer gambling overseas had topped 1 trillion yuan (US$161 billion) annually.”

Presumably they are referring to the same same study. If this is the case, then either WCT are misreporting the figures from the study, or the study is self contradictory. $161 billion definitely doesn’t go into $97 billion. $161 billion also happens to be a pretty big chunk (almost 2%) of China’s entire GDP for 2013 ($9.2 trillion), making it a number that’s very hard to take seriously.

The China Center for Lottery Studies does have form when it comes to making big claims. In 2006, then head Wang Xuehong told the Xinhua news agency that $87.5 billion was being spent on Internet betting, underground casinos and other forms of illegal gambling.