Sebastian Salat, President, WMS International, shares his thoughts on the Asian market
With its innovative products and flexible approach to players and operators, WMS has consistently increased its global market share in recent years. Most recently, in North America in the June 2010 quarter, the company has overtaken IGT to become the market leader by ship share.
In Macau, the slot market is an immature one, and players’ preferences are rapidly evolving away from hard-core gambling to more leisure-style play—with a clear segment of regular leisure slot players having emerged. One of the obvious potential beneficiaries of this development is WMS, whose games are acknowledged to offer superior entertainment value.
Although Chinese players have a strong aversion to straying from tried and trusted games (which has helped Aristocrat’s initial dominance in the market to endure), familiarity with WMS’s products is steadily growing and the company appears poised to make further inroads into Asia.
Inside Asian Gaming talked to Sebastian Salat, President, WMS International — featured in this issue’s Asian Gaming 50 – 2010—about his company’s plans for Asia and beyond.
IAG: It seems there’s no stopping WMS in the US, but the company still has a long way to go in improving its share of the Asian market. What is your strategy for Asia? Do you have any Asia-specific initiatives planned for the next 12 months?
WMS is making steady progress with our push into the Asian gaming market. While we are pleased with the amount of success we have had to date in a relatively short period of time, our goal is to continue our momentum and gain additional market share. Our products have gained growing acceptance among Asian slot players and we continue to focus on producing content and play features that meet the entertainment demands of players in the market.
Complementing our game development efforts, which includes expanding our R&D efforts towards products for the Asian market, is an increase in our support infrastructure in the region including additional local sales, marketing and technical support personnel.
How about anything specific in terms of game design for the market?
Through our Player Driven Innovation™ development initiatives, we have found that players, regardless of region, respond similarly to innovative play features and content that provides them with the best entertainment experience. With this understanding of what players want, our game developers focus on applying a suite of our core technologies across our game portfolio to enable these games to be flexible enough to work in many countries, support multiple languages and offer localised symbols and game features. We continue to cultivate our understanding of the preferences of the Asian slot player. Over time, we have found that Asian players tend to prefer more highly volatile games and, to that end, we have adapted a portion of our game portfolio.
Can you tell us a bit about your overall global corporate strategy?
WMS has always focused on developing distinctive gaming experiences for players and operators for all the markets in which we operate, including Asia. “Today, international quarterly unit shipments typically account for close to 40% of our total unit shipments, and we are continually working to increase our market penetration across the globe.”
In order to grow our business globally, we are expanding into new markets and focusing on making sure we have the right products for operators depending on the dynamics of their individual markets. We have recently entered new markets such as Australia and Mexico and expect to enter more international markets such as Italy in the coming fiscal year. Furthermore, to diversify the range of products we offer to casino operators around the globe, we continue to devote significant resources to R&D efforts and, as a result, we now offer products such as Class II gaming machines, a value priced platform in our Helios™ cabinet as well as VLTs. All this is in addition to our extensive range of content on our industry-leading Bluebird™ 2 and new Bluebird xD™ platforms.
Can you please share your thoughts on the development of the Asian slots market? Which markets do you have particularly high hopes for? What opportunities do this present for WMS?
We view the entirety of the Asian marketplace as ripe for growth and continue to push forward in most markets. Our ability to capture market share in these growing markets will certainly be a driver of WMS’ long-term international success. We have had very good success in gaining floor share and generating solid financial returns for our customers in the Philippines and in Singapore while our floor share in the casinos of Macau continues to grow. As demonstrated by our offerings at the G2E™ Asia 2010 show in Macau, WMS’ product range for the Asian marketplace is extremely robust and we experienced a very positive reception from customers at the show. Looking forward, our initial product launches in Vietnam have generated a solid financial performance and we are devoting increasing levels of R&D spending to the South Korean marketplace and we expect these efforts to begin to bear fruit very soon.
Do you have any observations on the differences across Asian slot jurisdictions— Macau, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Indochina, etc? For example, the Philippines is a more mature market, whereas Macau is newer, and this impacts game preferences. Do you have different strategies across the markets?
As I mentioned earlier, there are very many similarities in the preferences of Asian slot players in different markets and, for that matter, Asian slot players and slot players around the world. Most of the slot players served by our international customers prefer the same products and we work very hard to ensure these operators and their players have the latest and greatest products from WMS. However, the different markets in Asia do have their special needs due principally to differences in playing habits among players. In Macau, the players tend to be more serious gamblers so they are not necessarily seeking out a particular slot machine for its entertainment value. Contrast that with a player in the Philippines who is more likely to sit at a machine for a longer period of time as they seek out the entertainment of the game. As we do in all of our development efforts, WMS consistently considers input from slot players in order to deliver a best-in-class gaming experience at all times.
Participation gaming (revenue share) has been on the rise in the US. Unfortunately, it is not permitted in Macau, but is it applicable to any other Asian markets and are you pursuing it?
At present, WMS has decided not to pursue revenue share opportunities in Asian markets where it is permissible, but we do have other economic models, that are over and above a pure for sale model and which can generate recurring revenues for the Company. As in the US, these economic models allow us to provide our casino operator customers with a constantly fresh supply of our newest and most advanced games to meet the demands of their players.
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