I N T E R V I E W DA V I D B A A Z O V
PROFILE
David Baazov
Chief executive Amaya
Amaya’s growth is not one that can be matched by many others in gaming. James Bennett meets its elusive and manically busy founder to discuss “unwanted assets”, integration, humility and con?dence
H
is tag as arguably the one person most people in the industry would like to meet is ?tting for David Baazov, founder, majority shareholder and chief executive of Canadian software supplier Amaya. The only problem with that, though, is he’s never free and almost impossible to track down. I got him on a phone call to his office in Montreal. After, that is, being left on hold for 23 minutes. “I’m going to make the effort to travel less… as of 2014,” he says, adding that 2013 will be a “pivotal year” for the business and he spent the large part of last year on a plane bound for meetings with customers, suppliers and, more often than not, companies he was looking to acquire. Baazov founded (in 2004), owns and in 2010 IPO’d one of the industry’s fastest growing software suppliers on the Toronto stock exchange, all while still in his thirties. And he’s still a way off becoming 40. The last two years have been the turning point, seeing the company grow from a medium-sized enterprise with a handful of staff to one which now employs more than 800 personnel, has 150 customers, and with fourth quarter revenues projected to top £40m, and that does not include any income from its recent ?urry of acquisitions. It is those takeovers, however, that has put the young executive and his prized asset ?rmly on the online gaming map.
Acquisitions galore The spree began in July 2011 when the ?rm identi?ed Cryptologic and Chartwell, two fellow Canadian gaming suppliers, as potential targets,
taking a 5% stake in the former and bidding to entirely acquire the latter. Crypto’s huge library of casino content and Chartwell’s casino games and platform expertise and technology were too good for Baazov to turn down, so much so that he then took the decision six months later to buy Torontolisted developer Cryptologic for $34.5m. The next two came almost simultaneously in September last year, with Baazov swiftly jumping into US supplier Shuffle Master’s shoes in bidding for bwin.party-owned poker network Ongame, as well parting with $167m, its largest sum for a business to date, for US land-based slot manufacturer Cadilliac Jack. Some corners of the industry have described the majority of these newly acquired assets as “unwanted” due largely perhaps to Chartwell and Crypto’s legacy systems and with one (Ongame) described as “surplus to requirements” by its now former co-CEO Jim Ryan. Baazov’s response, however, is short and swift. “In the case of each acquisition, we were not a sole bidder, so I don’t know how unwanted they are, plus they were very wanted by us.” His vision for Amaya following the quartet of contracts: “To leverage our technology in order to enable our customers to acquire independent players of any medium of acquisition, whether it be through physical, virtual or mobile channels; and the strategy is for us to execute on that and enable those customers to increase the yield generated from players to further drive the revenue base.” Simple. Or so you he would have us believe, but judging from Amaya’s competition in the form of
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