ZANE MERSICH, NOVOMATIC UK
understand it. Subsequently, I have been leading all our UK business through the growth phases from my arrival in mid-2008. Before my appointment as CEO of NOVOMATIC UK, I was CEO of the Astra Gaming Group, which was the holding company for all our UK businesses at the time: that would include Astra Games, Bell-Fruit Games, Gamestec, RLMS, Mazooma Interactive Games and Luxury Leisure. Subsequent to that we have added Playnation and Talarius and re- branded under NOVOMATIC UK.
CI: If you didn’t know the industry, how did you
get hired? ZM: NOVOMATIC was growing rapidly and has
always been a business that recognises you need good people from different backgrounds. I was very fortunate to have met the right person and as long as you have excellent business sense, love the industry and the products you have a good chance of being successful. The thing about gaming is, you will not be successful if you don’t love the product and the industry, you need to love the games and people. And who wouldn’t? So I found a role and started to work with the company. When the opportunity arose here in the UK, they needed someone to drive the UK business forward. At that point, we were quite small and had less than 100 people at Astra Games. My mission was to grow a solid UK footprint. The UK has
always been a good, stable, innovative gaming environment; the industry is established and mature, and it is arguably the most regulated, though is reasonably sensible. But more than that, it is stable and there are unlikely to be any major shifts and changes. It’s also a big industry, and as a European company, it was important for us to establish a meaningful business here in the UK. Astra Games was the base from which we grew, and at the time it was quite difficult because in 2008 the Lehmann Brothers bankruptcy devastated the financial markets, which was a game changer for many different sectors and companies. Nobody saw it coming, it just arrived. From there I realised it would be more difficult to
achieve the more organic growth I had hoped for because there was less investment in product, customers were risk averse and simply not investing, there was great uncertainty, and it’s hard to grow in that kind of environment. However, change equals opportunity, so we took a different approach and decided to look at acquisitions. Companies with private equity or hedge fund ownership started thinking they needed cash, not assets. We started acquiring at competitive prices – Bell-Fruit Games, Gamestec and others, and this was the start of our growth. We knew that we could grow further from there. NOVOMATIC is also a major operator in Europe, and that’s something we lacked in the UK, so
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