TA L K I N G P O I N T S F E A T U R E
JOHAN STYREN
PUTTING THE WEB TO BED
START-UP CASINO OPERATOR LEOVEGAS IS EXPERIENCING HUGE GROWTH IN ITS CORE SCANDINAVIAN MARKET THROUGH A DEFINITIVE FOCUS ON MOBILE. CEO JOHAN STYREN EXPLAINS THE SECRETS OF ITS SUCCESS AND REVEALS HIS EUROPEAN EXPANSION PLANS
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Since its launch in early 2012, LeoVegas has impressed onlookers by taking on far more established operators in Scandinavia and grabbing signi?cant market share. Featuring a huge range of games from the likes of Net Entertainment, Microgaming and NYX Interactive, players can play online and on mobile, but it is by far the latter in which LeoVegas is making the biggest waves. It backs up its portfolio of games, most recently with the addition of live casino, with a proprietary single-page technology which means its HTML5 site is as fast and accessible as a native app. CEO Johan Styren describes its growth over the past year as “just crazy” and 2013 has shown no signs of slowing down, with double digit revenue growth every month so far. Weekly deposits are currently exceeding €1m, making it the most successful mobile commerce service outside of the App Store in the markets that it serves, according to Styren. Impressive results indeed, not to mention it scooping the eGR Innovation in Casino award last month, but going from a small start-up to a major player brings its own challenges. Its successful launch in Sweden was judged perfectly in
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tandem with the country’s increasing smartphone and tablet penetration, and timing its expansion further a?eld is dependent on a similar environment. “Moving into new markets is one of our biggest opportunities but also a huge challenge,” Styren says. “We need to ?nd those right markets – Germany, Holland and Austria, for example – which are at the right level of mobile and smartphone penetration for us to succeed.” And perhaps yet harder, especially with aspirations to take on the big guns, is ensuring the company maintains the entrepreneurial spirit which has taken it so far in such a short time. It is that attitude which has allowed it to be truly mobile-?rst, a shift which Styren foresees taking much larger companies far longer. “I think big operators will shift to a mobile, but only when they see mobile revenues grow to where web revenues are,” he says. “That will take some time. I don’t think their focus will fully shift until that happens. In Scandinavia some big operators have reconsidered after seeing our success. They’ve realised stuff is happening now and they can’t afford to wait. I think we’ve pushed the market forward in that respect.”
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