Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | September 2011 64 David Punter INSIGHTS E arlier this year, Aristocrat launched its ViridianWideScreen (WS) cabinet with a strong suite of supporting games. The Viridian WS has done well so far, consolidating Mr Punter’s position on our Asian Gaming 50 list. Mr Punter explained to Inside Asian Gaming it was important to assemble a collection of robust supporting products before launching WS. “In previous years, we’ve launched a new cabinet but without perhaps the right games, so the feeling was that the cabinet hadn’t performed, whereas it had been the content that hadn’t worked. We’ve certainly learnt from the lessons of the past, and when launching the Viridian WS cabinet it was paramount that we had both a strong standalone and linked product portfolio to ensure our continued Asian success. IAG publisher KareemJalal caught upwithMr Punter at Aristocrat’s Macau showroom for the latest instalment in the INSIGHTS series, produced in collaboration with Aomen TV, a member of the Ignite Media Group. Below is a transcript of the interview. Kareem Jalal: Aristocrat’s been top dog in the Asian slot sector for a long time, and so some people say you can only go down from here. What are you doing to maintain your position? David Punter : We consider ourselves like a premium player in the market. I wouldn’t consider ourselves top dog, even though we’ve got great market share. I think we can’t be arrogant about that. If you take a step back from that, we are really looking at how we can do better product strategies to meet our players’ needs and our customers’ needs. Some key examples of that are some of our ‘Asianising’ of our products. That doesn’t mean all our products have to have Asian art and Asian graphics, but moving forward we are looking at a stronger portfolio with that content in it for 2012 and 2013 and beyond. On answering your question about can we go down? Well, yes, we can, but we are very confident that we’re starting to understand some of the unique aspects of the market that are coming out: more feature-rich games, games with top boxes, entertainment-style games. Whether we should be entering the market with steppers and INSIGHTS – Inside Asian Gaming Aristocrat Technologies’ General Manager Asia Pacific David Punter is under the spotlight in the latest instalment of IAG’s video interview series with leading members of the Asian gaming industry. Mr Punter replies to critics’ claims that Aristocrat’s dominance in the Asian slot sector has made it slow to innovate and develop new games, and explains what his company has in store to maintain its market-leading position. The interview can be viewed online at the IAG website, www.asgam.com those types of products is yet to be considered. SomemoreUS-style product games canbe built into the portfolio. That’s all about speed to market, understanding your market, your strategies, working with your operators and your players more. I think that’s a key success story for Aristocrat where we have been building our market share over the last couple of years; not greatly, but a couple of percentage points every year. I’d like to maintain that. It’s a core focus for me, the team at the Sydney office and R&D that we focus on those key elements and understand changes in the market with technology as well as what products work and building on some of our great brands and extensions that are already in the marketplace. There’s a perception that Aristocrat is slow to innovate and develop new games. What’s your response to that? I’d say technology-wise we’re probably a little bit behind where the US is with some of our cabinets and LCD buttons, but they’re coming. We have put some strategies in place to expedite what we take to the US markets and bring that to other markets, including Australia, in a lot faster fashion. Developing a common base which can be used across common markets rather than having different bases is one way we are looking at speeding up that process of taking