One of the talking points of G2E this year was the rapid rise of Amaya Gaming and its determination to grow by acquisition.
The company had a booth at the show, but another on the opposite side of the floor, which was several times larger – signifying its acquisition only a week before the show of Cadillac Jack, the major Class II game producer.
Amaya, the brainchild of David Baazov, has grown very quickly into a principal supplier of gaming solutions and is now traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. In a short time it has manifested itself as a four-faceted business, with online B2B, government solutions, land-based casinos and entertainment.
Baazov started the company in 2004. He had a background in computers but developed his own electronic poker tables and electronic roulette games.
Baazov’s acquisition trail began with Chartwell, the online B2B company, in July 2011, followed by CryptoLogic in December of last year. Only a week before the G2E show, the company announced the C$168m acquisition of Cadillac Jack and the day before the show opened came news that it had acquired Ongame Network, the interactive poker company based in Sweden.
Meanwhile, Amaya has built on its partnership with governments. The company has a contract to administer the gaming operations of Moldova’s government on a 20-year exclusive. It also runs SMS readers for Kenya and Uganda and has a 10-year contract with the government of Armenia to implement a national lottery.
Simon Westbury, sales manager for Amaya Gaming, based in Malta, told iNTERGAMINGi: “The future of the company is both online and offline, mobile and tablet gaming. We are a technology solutions provider that wants to take advantage of the convergence happening in the gaming industry today. We are looking forward to the opening of the US online gaming market, which is currently experiencing positive momentum. We are in a sound position to take advantage of that; we have some strong connections and endorsements. We are far more visibly transparent than many of our potential competitors for the US market.
“I believe that we are looking at perhaps 18 months before this market opens and our presence at shows like G2E and the acquisitions we have made illustrates and underlines the fact that we are preparing for that event.”
