“High performance, flexibility and customer responsiveness are key when building long-term strategies”

What are Betradars's business targets for the year ahead?

To ensure we keep hold of our market-leading position, we need to look beyond simply adding new sports, leagues and markets. A clear product differentiator, combined with constant innovation and investment in new technologies is needed. To deliver more exciting sports data products to our clients around the world, we will seek further investment in the future of innovative, data-driven solutions.

In addition to that the development of new betting experiences will be a key priority of the business. Virtual sports betting for example offers 24/7 entertainment for the punters with unlimited betting opportunities and fast pay-outs to increase revenues. The mobile version of our virtual sport is a first step into the direction of a new experience. We are currently working on the implementation of new exciting virtual sports products, which are the most realistic products in the market.

Furthermore, we are continually working on the extension of sports for which we offer our Live Betting Solutions, a service that is used by over 150 bookmakers in the market. Having introduced Table Tennis, Rugby League, Bowls and Cricket in 2014, we are planning the integration of Aussie Rules, Hurling and Waterpolo as new sports in 2015. We want to significantly increase the number of sports events offered, providing clients with over 20,000 live matches per month.

How are you planning to enter new markets?

The growth of our company over the past years was outstanding. To keep up with the pace of expansion is a challenge we’re facing with great excitement. But these developments also opened up great opportunities in different fields for us and underlined the importance of strategic partnerships throughout all different business segments.

Being the market leader we’re always screening the market for new business opportunities such as acquisitions or partnerships.There are a lot of companies with great potential out there. If these companies can add value to Sportradar or synergies can be generated, they are interesting options to think about partnering up with. We are very happy with the great number of partnerships signed in the past year and won’t change our attitude towards that topic in 2015. So far we have signed partnerships with the MLS, NASCAR and the German Handball League, just to name a few. We’re pretty confident about adding more names to the list this year.

Gaming experts assure that “A number of the largest gaming companies today will not be in the same ownership by the end of 2015,” what are your predictions for the year ahead? Do you believe the gaming industry is on the right path to strengthen its position in the business?

Both the online gaming sector and the mobile gaming sector are growing dynamically and face rapid changes all the time. Technical developments played a major role in influencing the design of products and the industry over the past years.

For the industry it is required to understand the demands of a fast changing market to stay efficient or become even more efficient and design products and services based on this analysis whilst improving quality steadily. There is high pressure to automate processes and to reduce costs.

Our Managed Trading Services product approaches this issue and lets operators streamline processes whilst outsourcing labour intense tasks and risk management. At Betradar we enable bookmakers to succeed in an increasingly competitive market while reducing operational costs and the risk of running a labour-intensive in-house operation.

How important is it to bring about new legislation to regulate gaming?

Sportsbook operators that want to successfully adapt to address locally regulated markets face multiple challenges including varying tax levels, lower margins compared to dot.com, different local compliance and licensing requirements as well as varying consumer preferences. The online sportsbook market became more competitive and the continued rise of in-play betting via smartphones and mobile devices has increased the technological demands and standards operators have to meet. In order to stay ahead of the competition, operators need to invest in the long-term adaptability of their organization and technological infrastructure. High performance, flexibility and responsiveness towards the end customer are key elements of a long-term growth strategy.