With black stilettos, a blond bob and a slash of red lipstick, Milanese accountant Maria Teresa De Gasperi is dressed for a night out in Switzerland. Her visits to Lugano’s casino have grown less frequent as her gambling budget declined.
“A lot, lot less,” she said, referring to her spending while sitting on a sofa in the casino’s brightly lit foyer.
The Swiss town of Lugano has been home to a casino for the past century and about 80 percent of the gamblers are Italian, according to its management. The town, south of the Alps beside a sparkling blue lake and palm trees, is about an hour from Italy’s financial hub of Milan by car or train, and at the frontier of Europe’s prosperous north.
A liberalization of the predominantly Catholic country’s once-strict laws has helped gambling gain prominence in Italy, where the economy is mired in its longest slump in more than 20 years. That change, combined with the strength of the Swiss franc, is making times tough for casinos in Switzerland’s Italian-speaking canton of Ticino. The franc appreciated by about 25 percent against the euro during the past five years. It rose 0.2 percent to 1.2365 per euro at 11:33 a.m. in Zurich.
The gaming industry’s malaise stands in contrast to much of the rest of the Swiss economy, which has managed to recover from the contraction it suffered in 2009. In the first quarter of 2013, Swiss growth outpaced Germany’s, the most resilient economy of the 17-member currency area.
Gross revenue for Switzerland’s 21 casinos was down 24 percent last year compared with 2008, when the financial crisis erupted with the collapse of New York-based Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., official statistics show. The decline occurred even as new casinos opened, including one in Zurich.
