foreign ERS and welcome to the latest GI huddle I'm with Google CEO of smart soft gaming Google thanks for joining us and how are you thanks for having me team I'm good how are you yeah really good um based out of London uh you are in in Georgia I believe I mean what's it like over there we're based into busy it's getting warmer the spring is starting so the weather is pretty nice good to hear we're not so lucky in London but you know I think we will get a bit of heat in the summer hopefully yeah yeah um so we're here to talk to you today about kind of your role smart soft in general uh to start off with could you kind of walk us through your your career I see you've got a lot of experience in banking how is that kind of prepared you for being CEO at smartsoft yeah sure I have uh business education and then I did a brief stint in construction but on the finance side then I moved to Banking and corporate Banking and I was covering mainly different Industries I think banking gives a it's very fast paced it gives you a lot of insight in different businesses how things work and you analyze their strategies and work with the shareholders and the management teams so I think it was a good basic preparation for the role of the CEO at smartself and I've been here for around to almost two years now [Music] cool so two years in as you say um can you walk us through your your day-to-day role as CEO kind of what does it involve what what are you in charge of um you know apart from the company of course we're um besides running the daily operations um I work a lot on the strategy on the long-term vision of the company um about what are the priorities where should we which Market should we enter how should we develop our product so on and so forth so it's like in many directions mainly strategy and priorities for the company and short-term and long-term goals of course along with the man of course on the daily basis working with the management team sure and can you tell us a little bit more about the company itself so obviously a you know a game Studio but very much a focus on kind of non-traditional games and and such as you've got a jet X product I'm sure you want to talk about yeah Smart Talk is the Pioneer in one of the first companies that's really started pushing this non-traditional games category these are basically games that you wouldn't uh relate to casinos but are just regular games that you would gamble on and we see a huge opportunity there as the uh video games are one of the biggest sub uh sectors of entertainment industry so we kind of saw that opportunity that you can maybe Bridge eye gaming and gaming and kind of bring a lot of audiences that play video games and would like to gamble to to traditional casinos we of course we didn't invent this the type of games and there were certain ideas but usually they were very Niche products and casinos had their own mini games we were the first ones who added a lot of gamification elements and saw the opportunity of scaling them and currently we have unique content we focus a lot on the Innovation on the quality of the product and we basically what we strive for is to push the limits of eye gaming sure you mentioned a huge opportunity of kind of that that uh I'm not sure if we should call it a mini segment or you know a segment within within casino games how much potential in this area is there in terms of kind of Market size and and getting these games out there the size of the video games Market is like 130 billion and we see people gamble on a lot of stuff they gamble on crypto they gamble on stock market so there's this innate uh uh how to say desire to uh take certain risks and be a winner and also we see a lot of interest in video games so our vision is that we can bring a lot of elements from traditional video video games to the igaming space and this will enable operators to bring in a lot of new audiences that were not previously the casino players so to say sure um I briefly asked you about George earlier I was just you know talking about the weather and things like that but on a from a business perspective what's it like operating out of activity it's great actually uh Georgia has a uh in online it's very well developed country we started pretty early so there's a lot of know-how around here and we've been doing this business for we've been in eye gaming our team has an experience in eye gaming for 20 plus years so they started out with land bad shop software and then we did um Sportsbook and stuff so there's a lot of know-how in the country the tax system is great it's very easy to do business here banking is great so you can find really good talent for a very competitive compensation so I would say it's one of the unexplored gems of doing business really small country and really nice we see a lot of people coming in lately fantastic wasn't the case before yeah yeah so we talked about the kind of the opportunities and potential uh but obviously there's there's a lot of competing game studios you know it's a it's a competitive market what are the biggest challenges uh game studios such as yourself are facing at the moment yeah sure we were as said we were one of the first ones who pushed this segment and tour so we had two challenges basically right you want to uh expand at the same time uh expanding with a known product to the market is much easier but in our case we were pushing the product that was unknown and there was a lot of skepticism yeah I think our strong points is that we always strive for Innovation we do very unique content and basically compared to other uh providers who do mainly iterations of the existing content we do a lot of innovative stuff and we're happy about it because we see then a lot of people doing the same kind of stuff and we we see ourselves as setting the trend in many uh uh in this segment and in many subcategories of this type of games and of course as the there's this as this category is getting a lot of traction and popularity around the world a lot of people are jumping on the opportunity and so we see a lot of companies entering the space well established programmatic play Tech they've they've done you know this type of games and as well like smaller Studios as well but at the same time we see that we see a lot of people entering this market and we already see some some companies exiting because uh there is a misconception that these games are simple everyone can do them and I agree everyone can do them if it's for very small number of players everyone can do them for 1500 players but if you want to do it for 10 000 concurrent players then it's super complicated so what we see is that very few companies can scale and can achieve success and if you don't have a unique content and if you have just one game which you which is more more often imitation of the existing content then there is not much opportunity for you so to return to your question basically the Big Challenge currently we face is that a lot of people are entering this segment and we have to educate a lot of operators about the product why is it why is our content good why is it good and basically at the same time be always on the Forefront of innovation to never lose their Edge and be interesting provider for most of the operators cool um you mentioned scale and growth a lot of couple questions from me related to that topic because I want to ask you about your your future goals uh starting with the rest of 2023 you know what's coming out for smart soft in terms of maybe Market launches products Partnerships that kind of thing uh we are expanding pretty fast so uh in 2022 uh well we doubled the size of the company this year we were planning to Triple the size of it uh the good Trend that we see is our non-traditional segment is growing at the triple digit pace which is great um but we are entering many contents we're expanding very aggressively in Latin in Africa in Western and Eastern Europe and so all over the world basically we see a lot of potential in the Emerging Markets currently yeah and they were the ones who uh saw the opportunity much earlier and believe in that I believe in this type of game so they're pushing in marketing them quite a lot so we see huge growth there and of course we've uh We've uh besides expanding with our current portfolio we very much so our strength is the team we're very sad we're very strong on the technical side and have huge experience our art and design team is top-notch and they good they do really good so we always focus on player and our partner journey and try to uh create the best experience for them so in non-traditional recur non-traditional games category we currently have around 10 games and we're planning to release 10 more this year yeah and a final word for you is longer term you know CEO of the company was if you could maybe pick out one sort of Target or goal you know what would you really like to see the company achieve and do we want to remain the leader of non-traditional uh casino games leading provider in that segment and we want to do a lot of new and good stuff and expand our current portfolio as much as possible around the globe thanks very much for your time uh really interested to hear more about smarts often and good luck for the rest of the year thanks for watching