Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2011 16 S unplus can offer a range of revenue and licensing models to suit the size of the client’s operation and the nature of the regulations in the market or markets where the client wishes to operate White label “If you’re a small- or medium-sized poker room in Europe, you may not have a sports book at all, so we can provide a white label solution. “If an operator already has a white label package from one of the other software providers, the quality available in the market generally isn’t that good. We are targeting those operators. They can license the product from us, we give them the software and we also run the whole sports book for them. They then pay us a small initial fee and a share of what we call ‘player losses’ or ‘software royalty’. “A typical licensee for us is a Western guy who has a good brand and knows how to market, but doesn’t up to that point have the right product. That’s a relatively easy one for us. We give him a very cost competitive sports book, all the tools he needs and all the markets he needs. There is also a big difference between a real turnkey solution and those providers that purport to offer these services but are in fact scraping prices from third party sites with no real trading expertise. “The third type of licence we have is the big sports betting group that may want a niche product from us. They have their own [trading] teams and their own sports books, but they may want just ‘in play’ soccer because we have so many live events available,” he states. “The typical revenue share terms we can offer a licensee are a lot more attractive than a typical Western operator. That’s because we already have a very profitable business in Asia. For us to add additional licensees adds only marginal costs. It’s just a question of the time it takes for our software guys to launch a new skin. That’s very different from the smaller software companies based in Europe.” Click Versus Brick The Sunplus business model A sk some gambling software providers to set up a new website and you could be waiting a year, claims Carlos Salas. Sunplus has turnarounds that can be measured in a few months, he says. “Our record for licensees to set up their platform is two months. Once they got the hardware and ISP out of the way they integrated the turnkey solutions within two months. Some competitors can take a year.” Website platforms from Sunplus come with a pre-designed template, though larger companies with bigger budgets and brand identity to support will generally choose bespoke solutions, says Tom Hall. But with all the ‘skins’—the front of the website that the customer sees and uses—the idea is that after handover to the client, the site should be as user-friendly as possible at the back end as well as the front end. “Our Chief Technical Officer Bill Koh The Front End Off the peg or tailor made customer interfaces to suit different needs and different budgets Sports skin—the ONEbook customer interface Global appeal—online soccer betting redeveloped the software product so that effectively a licensee can change the look and feel of the skins used on a licensee’s site muchmore andmuchmore easily than other platform providers can,” explains Mr Hall. “It means we don’t have to get involved so much. Licensees can move things around, add newbanners, that sort of thing, to define what the customer sees. Licensees don’t want to have to send us requests to move a banner—it drives them insane.” Flexibility That ability to minimise the amount Sunplus