Sales of pension lotteries in South Korea shrank by nearly half on-year during the first six months of this year as public interest in monthly payout seems to be petering out, government data showed Monday.

According to the data provided by the finance ministry, sales of "Pension Lottery 520" came to 68.1 billion won (US$62.5 million) during the January-June period, down 48.1 percent from 131.3 billion won tallied a year earlier.

The pension lottery product pays out prize money to winners in monthly installments of 5 million won over 20 years just like pensioners get their entitlements.

When it was launched in July 2011, public interest soared, leading to the product selling out for five consecutive months.

The interest, however, seems to be whittling down recently, apparently reflecting the trend of people preferring a one-time payout to the monthly one, a government official said.

Meanwhile, total sales of lottery products here came to 1.63 trillion won during the first half, up 0.45 percent, or 7.5 billion won, from a year earlier, the data showed.

"Lotto" remained the most popular lottery product, with its sales reaching 1.50 trillion won, which accounted for 92.1 percent of the total lottery sales,

During the first half, 823.8 billion won, or 50.6 percent of the total sales, were paid out as prize money, according to the data.

The government now seeks to increase the number of stores selling lotteries in a bid to catch up with the overall growing sales.

As of end-2012, the number of lottery stores stood at 6,211, which is much lower than the 9,845 stores tallied in 2003.

The decrease is attributable to the government not granting additional licenses over the past 10 years, while some stores went out of business due to sluggish sales of change in ownership.

"We have commissioned a research on how many stores would be sufficient and will decide on how many licenses we should issue based on the result," a finance ministry official said. (Yonhap News)