New Entertainment Group: lightweight champions
Starting as a one-man band solving problems for mobile-first users in Africa, NE Group is now a global operation with 150 employees and counting. Imran Bukhari, Founder and CEO, reflects on a journey which began by putting the front-end front and centre of the user experience - and explains why being lightweight is no bad thing.
I began working at bet365 in 2009 when I moved to the UK. At the time there were only around 230 people! I was with them for seven years during which the business achieved amazing results. Tat was my foundation in the industry.
Since then, I have been involved in various businesses offering services in Africa and the Indian subcontinent where I realised how big a gap existed between the way mobile-first users see sports and content compared to markets such as Europe and the US that started with the bigger screens of laptops and desktops . It's a very different way of consuming content, which also means a very different way of advertising because on a mobile screen where you have limited bandwidth, the data is a challenge speed-wise.
We saw major challenges in terms of the bounce rates and that the bigger sites were not even loading. So, we started focusing on Africa and that's how I started the business proposition. My intention was very clear from day one - to create lightweight front-ends - and that's how we started the business. We were not a full sportsbook initially, but a lightweight front-end provider.
ONE OF A KIND
I came up with this model in 2016/17 and there was no other company offering this as a service. Like any other industry, the normal product cycle is that initially companies create everything in-house and, as the industry matures, everything is done by different parties. Tat's how industries become more efficient.
I think the gaming industry is now going through that same transition where companies like your bet365 and William Hill were doing everything in-house and then you saw a big influx of white label solutions. Now you have many platform providers, data feed providers, content providers.
However, there is a big niche and very important role which a lot of companies are missing right
Imran Bukhari, Founder and CEO NE Group
now and that's the front-end provider. Because when you have so many products, you still need to be looking different, agile, available on all the channels, be it your mobile, desktop, apps, SMS, various kinds of engagement tools, social media.
Te channels are ever changing and there is a big demand, especially for the mid- to big-tier operators to be available on these channels because your users are shifting. Tey're focusing on different channels, so you need to be available on those channels.
A ROARING SUCCESS
Tis is where we felt that there was a big opportunity for us so, in 2017/18, we signed our first client, BetLion in Kenya, which was a BetVictor Group company. We took on the challenge of creating the lightest sportsbook in Africa with only 350 kilobytes sites, which was super-fast ground-breaking technology for the market.
Tis necessitated looking at all sorts of factors because Africa is dominated by different low- end smartphones and web browsers - Opera Mini remains a popular web browser to this day - supporting USSDs and SMS. Essentially, creating products which are more Africa friendly. Because the data speed was the biggest concern and ability to finish operations during peak hours when you have very limited speed was a major issue. But we managed to do it.
Tat was our initial success and gave us a lot of
We created our entire business model from this. We created a front end and then created a platform, thinking foremost about how user experience should drive platform development. Tis has given us flexibility and success. Since then, we have been growing year by year. Te name New Entertainment was created with the view that sports and entertainment go hand in hand, and we think that in coming years you're going to increasingly see more amalgam and combined solutions.
GLOBAL OPPORTUNITY KNOCKS
Right now, every single operator is looking to expand into emerging markets, and they are mostly located in Latin America and Africa. We have several customers in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique. Te West and East coast are our biggest markets, and 888AFRICA is one of our biggest clients that recently acquired BetLion.
NEWSWIRE / INTERACTIVE / MARKET DATA P141
limelight. We then worked with the likes of LiveScore, 10bet, and many more big companies over the years since. We became the specialist in front-end services, and it became a natural progression to ask: why don't we do the full platform? A lot of clients were asking that as a question - “you are providing an amazing front- end service, why don't you provide the full platform?”
NEW ENTERTAINMENT GROUP
In 2021 we started looking at rebranding our business to become more relevant and that's where we rebranded as New Entertainment. Te ethos and idea behind New Entertainment is looking at sports a bit differently.
Gaming is an ever-changing industry and how people are participating with various models around sports, how they are consuming content, how they are engaging is ever-changing. We see a clear trend around newer audiences, the swipe - click - click generation. People want everything available to them with minimum interaction which requires solutions with front end-first technology at their core.
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