West Virginia Lottery exceeds sales target despite pandemic

The West Virginia Lottery has reported revenue of close to $1.2bn for the fiscal year 2020-2021.

US.- The West Virginia Lottery has revealed that it has exceeded its sales goal for the fiscal year 2020-2021 despite the impact of the pandemic crisis.

State Lottery Director John Myers reported that the lottery took total revenue of just under $1.2bn for the 12 months ending June 30. That compared to a forecast of $983m.

Myers said: “Each year we set a goal to exceed one billion dollars in total sales for the lottery. This year we ended up at $1.17 billion”.

He said that the lottery fund finished $17m above projections. Commission members described the revenue numbers as “impressive” and a “heck of an accomplishment” considering the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Myers said: “We still met the goal with the pandemic in place. It created a lot of challenges from the standpoint of the casinos were running, not necessarily shutdown over the last year, but with restrictions that kept them from having a full amount of people on the floor”.

The strong numbers came from record sales of traditional lottery games such as Powerball, Mega Millions and scratch-off tickets totalling more than $249m.

Scratch-off tickets sales were the highest on record, while video lottery also saw an increase in revenue to $480m.

“I think because people couldn’t go to the casinos, they were going to the smaller venues in order to play the machines and therefore we saw an increase in revenue on the LVL side,” Myers said.