Insight
Olympic Entertainment Group COREY PLUMMER
Olympic Entertainment Group Tallinn, Estonia
In November 2018, Olympic Entertainment Group’s Supervisory Board announced the appointment of Corey Plummer to the Management Board as Chief Executive Officer. As part of this reorganisation, Mr. Plummer resigned from OEG’s Supervisory Board.
Corey Plummer has more than 20 years of international gaming experience, including as Founder and President of North Sea Gaming, a sector-focused independent advisory firm, and as a senior executive at Holland Casino, Caesars Entertainment Group, SKYCITY Entertainment Group, Rush Street Gaming and Aristocrat Technologies.
An Olympic Champion for the European casino marketplace
As hosts to the ECA European Dealer Championship, held at the Hilton Hotel Park and Casino in Tallinn, Estonia, G3 took the opportunity to interview Olympic Entertainment’s CEO, Corey Plummer, about his recent appointment, the acquisition of OEG, and the wider European gaming landscape about to be dynamically shaped by a new “European Champion”
Why were you interested in Olympic Entertainment Group?
In helping to acquire the business, I viewed Olympic as a strong platform to build something that doesn’t yet exist in this market – a focused Europe-wide casino entertainment company. Tere are several multi-state operations in Europe, but they tend to be both separate and machines-orientated. You see very few live tables-orientated companies operating in multiple jurisdictions in Europe. And so the ability to take a platform like Olympic, build on its current success and expand into other geographies, means the company can become a “European Champion” in the casino operations space.
What was the raw material that you saw within Olympic to achieve your objectives?
I saw a willingness to travel in terms of the business model. Te company has a culture of market expansion. If you’re a local operator looking to expand into international markets, it’s natural to meet internal resistance from a cultural standpoint. At Olympic, the company has embraced international expansion, melding that culture throughout the management team, incorporating different languages, cultures and a history of geographic growth. We don’t
“At Olympic, the company has embraced international expansion, melding that culture throughout the management team, incorporating different languages, cultures and a history of geographic growth. We don’t need to re-educate the company in how to grow the business beyond its current geographies, Olympic has been doing that for 25 years.” Corey Plummer, CEO, Olympic Entertainment Group
need to re-educate the company in how to grow the business beyond its current geographies, Olympic has been doing that for 25 years.
What I want to bring to the company is a structured approach that is more analytical and thoughtful about market opportunities. We need to study the competitive landscape, understand current customer expectations, acknowledge the essential ingredients to being successful in different markets, and introduce new elements that enable us to dominate local competitors. It’s a different way of doing things.
How does Olympic expand and compete beyond its current geographies?
If you pick up an Olympic floor plan from Estonia and attempt to drop that model elsewhere in Europe, whether it works or not is pure luck. Tat was the
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Olympic way. Now we want to enter a market with an analytical approach when we are able to understand where we need to be geographically. We are able to map the region, understand population density and access to the location, analyse competitor footprints, identify white space opportunities and appreciate what’s working in the market and what isn’t.
Are you seeking to expand the Olympic brand or is the company a stepping-stone to a large multi- national group?
Expanding into new markets and, in some cases, other verticals, is more about managing a portfolio of assets than it is necessarily about the Olympic brand. In some markets where Olympic has a valuable well established brand, we will maintain it. From a retail perspective, where we can take the brand and expand we will and where acquiring brands makes more sense, we are prepared for that too.
What are the opportunities in the European space right now?
We are looking to expand our business models into complementary markets in terms of regulation, taxes, market dynamics, number of competitors, and structures within those markets that are compatible with our own. And where we can add an online/digital presence and tie everything together with our retail locations, those are the prime targets for what we want to achieve.
Olympic is a unique company in that we operate more than 100 locations with gaming halls offering slots, bars and sports betting, plus digital gaming and live casinos based in hotels. More often than not, European operators have incorporated one of those elements within their business. Tey might operate live casinos, but they’re not established in hotels. In Tallinn, we operate both the casino and the hotel. Olympic brought the first Hilton to the Baltic region. Tere aren’t many operators in Europe offering this kind of experience.
Live casinos in hotels (Hilton, Intercontinental, Radisson Blue) enables Olympic to be more proactive with its marketing. When you operate gaming halls you are tied to the geography in which you’re situated and to the locals that feed those sites. However, when you have a product such as the Hilton Hotel Park and Casino, you can be more proactive. Here we have a different customer turnover, from locals, to business people, to tourists through to summer seasonal visitors, and this enables us to have a much broader marketing offer, which can also include digital and sports-betting products. Few operators are able to manage all these elements at the same time.
Olympic’s model enables us to be a very different type of European operator – to be a European
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