26 March, 2021

Future Focus

Björn Krantz, Chief of Global Market Operations at Yggdrasil, outlines the direction he and his team are centred on in order to deliver quality beyond expectation, and innovation wrought from global adversity

What is the outlook for the rest of this year in terms of developing further opportunities, and delivering on your publisher business strategy?

In early 2020, we set a clear path forward, and outlined our vision to become the undisputed leader of online casino game publishing worldwide. We are blessed to have very motivated, dedicated and passionate colleagues that are fully tuned into the company strategy and direction. Our plan this year is to significantly ramp up our output of games, as well as enhance our operational focus on what we call “quality of sustainable earnings”. We will continue to invest in our modern and flexible technology, that enable us to be very responsive to new market and customer needs, at the same time securing reliable and available services for our partners. During the past year, we have launched key revenue driving initiatives in line with our publisher strategy; including the introduction of the franchise as a concept, significantly enhancing our third-party YG Masters Program, powered by our GATI technology, and the monetisation of our proven GEM (Game Engagement Mechanics) framework IPs such as Gigablox, Multimax and Splits.  

 

What are your hopes for a return to physical shows, and what other areas are you exploring to build awareness and visibility?

With ICE having been moved to 2022, the chances that we will return to big shows anytime soon are slim. We have entered into a new notion of normal to which we all must adapt. In that norm, however, we believe there will be new innovative routes to enhance internal and external ways of building, communicating and carrying out our core value statements. One interesting observation is that in light of current events, we are already seeing a significant increase in video and podcast productions. These productions carry key messages and positioning statements that provide a 360-degree connection for key stakeholders; whether they be linked to employer branding, reaching new and existing customer segments, exploring new financial markets and more. Since these unignorably fall in line with some of our own core values, we have since spent time scrutinising the enhancements video and podcasting productions can make on our own offering. We feel strongly that we would have no problem communicating with our client and player base across visual media channels with insightful and exciting information.

 

Specifically, how do you see retail fitting into a multi-channel business strategy?

Traditionally, we have focused on the online casino arena. As such, we have optimised our technology and business initiatives to enable us to be at the forefront of innovation within this industry space. In relation to collaborations with our key partners, as we have evolved into a multi-channel business, we have seen an increased demand for our content over multiple channels. Despite our multi-channel approach being in its infancy, we know that cross-selling our products comes with increased business strategy benefits, such as augmented brand awareness and ARPU. Our multi-channel approach allows us to really home in on our partners’ holistic market strategy, which is exactly the position we want to occupy. Recently, we signed our first game IP deal with Veikkaus and we can’t wait to go live and support their multi-channel agenda. 

 

How scalable is your business model, in terms of entering new markets, and adding new product offerings?

I am truly impressed by our teams’ capability to drive optimisation with eyes fixed firmly on improving our modern technology stack. However, our colleagues’ focus is not a lone one. Building business automation that can cater for the significant ramping up of our Global Roadmap Games, addressing new local and global markets, securing new customer opportunities and launching new value propositions remain at the forefront of our business consciousness. In terms of output, we see a completely different machine today than the one we set out with. Delivering to the markets, clients and customers we operate with is executed with an exceptionally positive difference. We are agile in our ways of working and always try to understand our customers' reel needs to allow us to become a more integral part of their strategy. By being closer to our partners’ strategy, we can be more efficient and align on priorities that matter most for our partners; and for our own business strategies.