Steve Sutherland, chief operating officer and executive vice president at Konami Gaming, believes that R&D is at the core of the company’s recent successes.
STEVE Sutherland, chief operating officer and executive vice president at Konami Gaming in the US, has been with the company for nearly 15 years.
He is also a member of the board of directors and chairman of the company’s compliance committee. “From the supplier side I joined the industry in 1994 with what was then Bally Gaming and Systems,” Sutherland told InterGaming.
“I stayed with them until January of 1999 when I went to Shuffle Master, after which I joined Konami in 2000. So I’ve been in the gaming industry for 20 years and I was in the technology sector for 20 years prior to that.”
Sutherland has been instrumental in the project to hugely expand Konami’s facilities in the US. “It’s all about research and development,” he said. “This expansion project is part of Konami’s next phase to become one of the top gaming suppliers, a goal which requires a continued investment in research and development.
“We need additional products, additional engineers for both games and systems and additional strategic research and development initiatives to put us ahead from a competitive standpoint. In addition, we’ve been consistently running two manufacturing shifts per day at our headquarters for the past five years. This expansion will give us the opportunity to take that down to one shift and bring diverse departmental groups back into one facility so we can benefit from that collaboration.” As a company with Japanese origins which has seen big success in Australia and useful progress in Asia and Europe, the US was always a target. Gaining enough market share and penetration to compete with the other giants of slot machine manufacture is a difficult task, but the current developments will make this task a whole lot easier.
“Our goal remains to be on the podium,” said Sutherland, “which would require us to roughly double our revenue, by way of increased market share and penetration. There’s great opportunity in both the games and systems arenas and our results will be based on the products we deliver to the market.”
Read the full article in the February issue of InterGaming
