Camelot hits the jackpot with its lottery price rise
NATIONAL Lottery operator Camelot posted the second-highest annual ticket sales in its history yesterday, with revenues of £6.73bn for the year to 31 March.
The sales weren’t enough to beat last year’s record of £6.98bn, but the firm said its multi-million pound marketing campaign to launch its more expensive £2 tickets had turned around the long decline of Lotto.
“We always said that matching the one-off performance of 2012-13 would be virtually impossible but to have very nearly done so – and without the feel-good factor of London 2012 and with far less luck on EuroMillions – underlines what a really good set of results this is,” said Camelot UK Lotteries boss Andy Duncan yesterday.
“It’s great to see our flagship Lotto game back in year-on-year growth after a long period of sales decline.”
Last month Camelot’s long-serving chief executive Dianne Thompson announced her retirement after 14 years in the role. The company is splitting the top job into two separate chief executive positions covering Camelot UK Lotteries and Camelot Global Services when Thompson leaves in October.
Camelot, which has been owned since 2010 by a Canadian investment fund, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, said it paid out £3.6bn in prizes to players during the year, taking the total prizes paid to date to £51bn since it launched in 1994.