Vietnam’s casino industry just 3% the size of Cambodia’s

Vietnam’s casino industry was worth a mere $61.3m in 2014, while the casino business in neighboring Cambodia was worth over $2b.

On Wednesday, the Institute for Regional Sustainable Development (IRSD) released a report showing Vietnam’s eight foreigners-only casinos earned combined revenue of VND 1.38t last year, of which VND 339b went to the government in the form of taxes.

On the same day, Cambodia’s central bank chief announced that her country’s casino industry generated annual revenue of $2b. Like Vietnam, Cambodia doesn’t allow its locals to gamble at its casinos, and Chea Serey, director general of the National Bank of Cambodia, claimed that income generated by casinos from non-residents “represents about 40% of total international travel credits.”

With the exception of the NagaWorld facility in Phnom Penh, most of Cambodia’s 59 casinos are small-scale affairs clustered near border crossings with Vietnam and Thailand. Using just Vietnam’s southern province Tay Ninh as an example, the IRSD estimated that around 200 Vietnamese cross the border into Cambodia every day to gamble, rising to 800 per day on weekends.