The coin machine industry’s few remaining links with Wales are being reduced still further. I learned the other day that Sanken Electrical Japan was closing its Pencoed factory shortly and withdrawing all of its facilities back to Japan.
The company has for 20 years been making power supplies for the gaming industry – and still does, for both analogue and digital machines – but out of an Indonesian factory. It was in 1997 that Sanken first started making power supplies for gaming machines from a modern factory in Abercynon, later closing it down and withdrawing to Pencoed, from where it eventually only carried out research work.
What’s left in Wales now? Not too much really, apart from Novomatic’s interests in Astra and associated companies at Bridgend. But for those of us who go back far enough, it is not unreasonable to suggest that the vast majority of the European AWP industry had its roots there.
After 1965, what happened in Spain, Germany and, much more recently, Italy, can be traced back to Ferry Road, Cardiff, where Morris Collings and his sons set up Automatic Coin Equipment, which was to become ACE. It then spawned a rash of offshoots, as key staff learned the business in Ferry Road and then left to set up on their own.
That bred JPM, Gemini, Gowerpoint, Thesis, Qual-Tec, AFD, Coinmaster, Signet, Lyngard, Baker and Cooper, Video Fruit Services, Summit, Terarose, Coin World, 3G Games, Dice, Sarmtern, Redpoint, BAS, DJE, Cleartone, Gamestream, Crystal, MDM and others. These are names mostly consigned to history and into the dim recesses the memories of those of us old enough – and we are becoming fewer every day!
It has to be remembered, that at its height, the UK AWP business had a wealth of AWP manufacturers. In my earlier Coinslot days, I can well remember counting 21 active producers of AWP machines in the UK, most of them with some kind of European connections. Even as recently as 2007, InterGame was able to produce a Wales Special Issue; a small, A5 standalone publication which was distributed with InterGame (a few copies still exist in the office storeroom).
At that time it was able to find advertising support from 20 suppliers in Wales, most of them providing parts, rather than of entire machines, but at least it indicates the rapid decline in the industry in Wales.
That early crop of small manufacturers revolutionised the UK industry and began to export to a wide range of export destinations – legal jurisdictions, illegal ones or grey markets – most of Europe originally got their AWPs from these manufacturers, before they learned the skills to make them for themselves.
Around the same time, Bell-Fruit was opened in Nottingham and was to prove, for many years, the only geographical rival to south Wales. It is interesting to note the difference between the manufacturing industries of the two countries. In England, almost no offshoots of Bell-Fruit became apparent, but in Wales, most of those named above were spawned from Ferry Road, in Cardiff, the home of ACE.
Interesting. So much for reminiscences – the reality is that Wales has now become a pale shadow of its former self, with all due respect to Novomatic’s investment there.
