2025.05.12 Daily Update: The Philippines, a Nation Addicted to Gambling, PIGO Heads Towards the Eye of the Storm

The day before yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend who has been living in the Philippines for many years and is engaged in the white industry. He remarked that now, whether in jeepneys, shopping malls, or street-side convenience stores, you can see Filipinos pulling out their phones to play online gambling everywhere. He spoke with great concern.

I looked up relevant data and found that this is not an exaggeration. Currently, nearly 3/4 of Filipino adults have participated in some form of online gambling in the past year, with women being the main demographic. What's magical is that national-level e-wallets like GCash have directly embedded gambling portals, making betting as easy as scrolling through short videos.

As practitioners, we do not discuss whether gambling is harmful out of a saintly attitude, but focus on the social phenomena and data that may trigger a "policy shift." History has proven that the downfall of POGO was due to insufficient tax revenue, but the resulting public disorder also exceeded the public and government's tolerance. Will today's PIGO follow the same path?

Faced with the trend of nationwide gambling, various sectors of Philippine society are reacting more strongly. Religious groups, especially the Catholic Church, harshly criticize the erosion of gambling culture on family structures and youth values; while gambling cessation organizations point out that the proportion of women in the help-seeking population has soared, indicating that the problem has shifted from the "black market" to "nationwide."

On the policy level, the Central Bank of the Philippines (BSP) has proposed a draft to prohibit any cooperation between e-wallets and online gambling platforms. This is a clear regulatory signal: the financial system is cutting off the "traffic entrance" to gambling. On the other hand, PAGCOR emphasizes that PIGO has become the third largest pillar of government finance, contributing 112 billion pesos in revenue in 2024, with dividends returning 4.59 billion pesos to the government, actively contesting the draft.

President Marcos's statement is even more intriguing. He said that if PIGO causes serious public security problems like POGO in the future, he will "shut it down without mercy." This means that the fate of the industry is in a delicate balance of "social harm - tax benefits - political will."

Currently, the government's attitude is conservatively progressive, coupled with a positive tax situation, PIGO still sits securely. Not only has it not tightened, but the government is also promoting legal offline BINGO gatherings to strengthen local tax revenue. This indicates that during Marcos's term, the gambling industry is still in a phase of benefit release, and practitioners can temporarily be worry-free.

However, the situation will not remain static forever. An accidental event, a media-exposed black swan event, or a political changeover is enough to instantly rewrite the entire game rules. The attitude of those in power determines the fate of the industry, and the opposition is always looking for a turning point. The next person "in charge" might play the "liquidation" card, and no one can be sure.

Therefore, practitioners should always pay attention to the "wind outside the table." What truly decides the life and death of the industry is not RTP or GGR, but that unstable policy dice, when it will land, and what number it will roll.

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