Lottery king?

Ice People

He is an avid movie watcher. But that is when he's not watching the bottomline of his Rs 1,500-crore business.

Bhavin Doshi, promoter of the Sugal & Damani Group of companies with interests in diamond trading, IT software and hotels and restaurant, says that he's back to investing more time in the company's 30-year-old lottery business. Why?

Because he does not want lose out on the potential of online lottery. "We have years of experience in the paper lottery business," says Doshi.

It was, perhaps, in order to compete with companies like Zee, Modi, Apollo and Essar which descended on the online lottery arena, that Doshi quietly started distributing his online machines last month.

Already 40 of his machines for the Arunachal Pradesh lottery tickets have been installed in Mumbai. His next stop is Nashik even as he rolls out another 250 machines in Mumbai.

Sugal & Damani Group's USP for its online lottery is that it promises to give out 90 per cent of its collections as prize money unlike the 50 to 60 per cent that most online players give. And secondly, the online lottery is an extension of its paper lottery business.

The idea is to first let the consumer learn to operate the machines. "Currently, all he does is to buy our lottery ticket online. Eventually, we will tailor-make new lottery games suited to the Indian consumer's tastes," he adds.

Soon Doshi will launch his machines in Punjab too, coinciding with the introduction of the Punjab State lottery online. The 32-year-old claims that the online lottery software has been designed completely in-house by his IT software company.

The soft-spoken Doshi says that he's currently putting in nearly 18 hours of work in a day juggling between the hotel and restaurant business and online lottery.

However, when free from worrying about his 10,000 sq ft shopping mall cum food court site at Mumbai's Ghatkopar, he loves spending time with his six year-old son.