In a statement, the listed company said its core net income or that excluding nonrecurring items for the second quarter of 2009 hit P122.9 million, up by 128 percent from year-ago level.

The company reported a core net income of P231.6 million for the whole of last year, riding on its partnership with state-owned Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. (Pagcor) on online gaming.

Net profit for the first semester of last year amounted to P149.6 million, based on an earlier filing with the Philippine Stock Exchange.

“Our growth pace continues to accelerate as we open more of our Pagcor e-Games Cafes (PEGS),” PhilWeb president Dennis Valdes said. “We just opened our 150th cafes. The 29 we opened over the first half of 2009 represent a faster opening rate than last year, when we opened 45 for the entire year.”

To further accelerate growth, Valdes said Pagcor would introduce a new e-Games logo that would distinguish all of its PEGS cafes from other Pagcor outlets. “The new e-Games logo is already being installed in all our existing cafes and in the new ones that will be opened soon,” Valdes continued.

“Other marketing efforts for the Pagcor e-Games Cafes have been intensified, so much so that the average daily casino win has been increasing steadily for the past 18 months,” Valdes said.

“In our 2008 annual report, we wrote that the record daily casino win for all 2008 was P8.14 million, set on December 26, 2008. This record has been broken several times, in fact, just about every two weeks, with the latest record being a casino win of P10.8 million for June 26, 2009,” he said.

June 2009 made the record as the best performing month in the history of PhilWeb.