THE BIG INTERVIEW
Bragg and Spin combine
…but it’s not your typical merger or acquisition – it’s about growth, as Bragg Gaming CEO Richard Carter and Spin Games CEO Kent Young explain
Richard Carter
Gaming International Online: How does a deal like this evolve, what’s the starting point? Richard Carter: From a Bragg perspective, the company had aspirations to want to enter the US market; they’re an established player in Europe and were going through the strategy. Before I joined Bragg I entered the US market with SBTech and built the business there so I know the pitfalls and everything you need to consider and do. It was clear to me very quickly that it would take 12-18 months before Bragg would be in a position to have a market entry strategy, which was too long. I started looking at what other options we had, and one was of course to look at an inorganic MNA strategy. Once we established that time to market wasn’t quick enough for us, we then looked at that more closely. We went through our options, we had quite a few; we spoke to Kent (Young, President and CEO of Spin Games) who was in the process of financing his business and was quite far down the line with that… We had preliminary talks and it led to where we are now.
GIO: When a deal like this happens there is often talk of ‘synergies’ and ‘efficiencies’; if you’re looking at this as your entry point into the US with a company that has some market share, is relevant in that market, et cetera… Are you looking at this as a relationship where Spin will be able to grow with you, rather than be pared down for efficiencies? RC: There is not a massive amount of cost synergies – we’re going to continue to invest and grow Kent’s business. There are
6 SEPTEMBER 2021 GIO
Kent Young
some synergies but they are more on the revenue side. 1+1 here is not 2; Kent has made an established business and they are presently pivoting away to creating and generating their own content which obviously has a much higher margin and a greater growth opportunity. What we bring to the party is a lot of exclusive content that is not currently being served to US customers. Through the relationship with Spin we can take that content and we can access the US market. That goes through the pipe Kent has developed with all of their operator partners. There’s a huge efficiency just in terms of doing that and a lot of incremental revenue opportunities. Then we have player engagement tool, jackpots, bonusing, leaderboards, quests, all these value-added products; again, we have already developed them, it’s a case of delivering them to clients in the US so that’s another synergy from a revenue perspective. There is also an opportunity to take what Kent’s developing for the US market and to bring that content to Europe, that’s a big opportunity. If you make good content, that content should work globally. Kent is working on some really interesting table game stuff which will work internationally, and a large proportion of the content will work internationally too.
We are in the process of nailing all of this down and quantifying it. But this is not like a lot of the deals we have seen in recent years, where they might be more of a defensive nature, due to regulatory creep, cost creep, supporting share prices through MNA. This is more about growth.
GIO: Kent, did you found Spin? Kent Young: Yes, I started the company in 2013. We’re eight years into the project. GIO: Is part of this diffi cult as the founder of the company, letting your company go – are you giving it up for adoption or harvesting its organs?
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