Bally Technologies CEO talks expansion

CEO of Bally Technologies, Richard Haddrill, has been speaking about the firm’s plans to expand and grow its international presence. Could this mean more jobs on the horizon? According to the Vegasinc.com, the regions local press, Haddrill spoke about how Bally is looking to attract a bigger and better international reach and what steps they had previously taken to achieve this.

He said: “It required big investments in people, staffing, product and design changes as well as feature changes. International growth is a pretty big story for us. When I got here, 6 percent of our revenues were from outside North America. Today, it’s 20 percent, yet our total revenues doubled. The rate of international growth has been quite rapid. We’ve been making some pretty big investments over the last five years to do that, and it puts us in a pretty good position going forward where we believe we can grow that international percentage to north of 30 percent in the next three or four years.”

Speaking about Macau and Singapore, he thinks that gaming in Asia is rapidly growing, with casinos potentially cropping up in Vietnam and Japan. Their focus is on Australia, “For us, we recently entered the Australia-New Zealand market, so that’s exciting. From a systems point of view, we’re the leading provider across Asia.”

The hottest topic on every gaming insider’s lips is poker. If it’s ever legalized, Bally thinks that they will have an important segment if the market.

“Internet poker is one relatively modest part of the Internet and social gaming experience. We see for our U.S. customers the broad spectrum of Internet gaming is evolutionary and not revolutionary. We think it’s going to be important, but it’s not going to be an overnight explosion for most of our customers.”

He also spoke about how they are hiring 300 global employees in an attempt to expand its mobile platform and how the future looks in terms of this, “We’re hiring and relocating people from Europe here. We’re hiring people for our mobile platform. To the extent that Nevada can be a leading state in regulating gaming, either through regulating casinos or hosting here, we would hire at an even faster pace. So we’re hiring now, but we see that accelerating as Nevada takes a leadership role.”