Quickspin CEO: Playtech not buying us to change us

With speculation rife as to where Playtech would use its M&A war chest next in the egaming space, the firm yesterday put to bed any rumours after announcing its acquisition of Quickspin for up to ?38m. A deal which comes just weeks after the supplier giant also reportedly completed an acquisition for fellow games developer GECO Gaming.

However, Quickspin is confident of maintaining its current company personality and independence now it is part of the growing Playtech family and larger corporate structure. eGaming Review spoke to Quickspin’s CEO and co-founder, Daniel Lindberg (pictured), to find out more about the deal.

eGaming Review (EGR): How does it feel to be part of the Playtech family?

Daniel Lindberg (DL): It’s actually really good. The deal has been going on for a couple of months through various discussions which we now landed earlier this week. When you go into a process like this, you have lots of ideas about which companies would be suitable and it wasn’t clear from the beginning that we would do this. We were contemplating whether to go public in a couple of years and build the company for that.

EGR: Why did you decide selling the company was the best route for Quickspin?

DL: We had three main criteria about what is important from a founders’ point of view. One is that we wanted to keep the brand, which is still very important to us. Keeping the corporate culture was also important as there is high employee satisfaction of people working here and they are proud of working for Quickspin. The second thing was maintaining independence. As we’ve been doing so well, we wanted things to continue as business as usual and be in charge over what we’re doing. The third criteria was price. However, I’d say all three were of equal importance and some of the other options in this process didn’t quite tick all the boxes.

EGR: And why did you go with Playtech in particular?

DL: Playtech was very clear from the beginning that they thought we were doing really well. They don’t want to change what we are doing and will support us with distribution, competence, compliance and legal. They said we could continue to run the Quickspin ship and we are not looking to change that. From an emotional point of view it feels really good but this is business as usual for us and we will continue to execute the business plan we set out last year.

EGR: So the day-to-day business will not change much?

DL: That is the plan. A few things will change, I’m not saying nothing will. But the general concept is for the company to remain swift and agile and continue to do the same things as before which we have done really well so far. They are not buying us to change us; it is quite the opposite actually.

EGR: Would you have gone public if you hadn’t taken this route?

DL: We were at that stage regardless of the ownership situation. If you have ambitions to truly make a mark and operate on a global level, we were just too small. If we need to double, triple or quadruple in size then I think going public was one journey we could have taken to do this. However, our shareholders are happy to be part of another company and it’s a really good alternative to going public.

EGR: Did you receive any offers for the company in the past?

DL: This has been a process which I can’t really say too much about. But what I can say is that it was competitive. We have been approached numerous times throughout the years, some of which were serious and some which were not. We constantly said no to such proposals and then we decided that we’re at a crossroads and that we should at least explore what this could mean.

EGR: What is the next stage in the deal?

DL: The deal is done and it might sound strange but there’s really not been much change. We’re still going to develop the games, which we will scale up further, continue to work with our partner Relax which supports us on the platform side. So I’m looking forward to making more deals with operators and consequentially more players.

EGR: Will there be any pooling of resources in terms of what Playtech already has on its books?

DL: That is certainly something we will look at. If there are possibilities of utilising their scale and resources, in whatever areas that might be, we will probably do so, although that was not really the rationale of the deal. However, they do have a distribution network, so that’s probably one area we will start looking into to see how we can start getting our games out into their network.