Making a splash: Superbet CEO on his plans to disrupt the online betting sector

When Jamie Hart left his post at Tabcorp’s UK-facing business last year, the name of his new employer was likely met with something of a collective shrug from most EGR readers outside of Central Europe. But fast forward one year later and ambitious Romanian operator Superbet has already become one of the most talked about companies in the European online gambling market.

Over the last 12 months, the Bucharest-headquartered firm has gone on a blistering hiring spree as it looks to spread its wings beyond its home turf by building a new international online team. And there have been plenty of familiar names added along the way. The operator benefitted from the connections of former William Hill CEO Ralph Topping who, in his role as chair of Superbet’s advisory board, played a crucial role in helping Superbet attract vast swathes of former Hills talent, such as Jamie Hart, Finbarr Joy, Stuart Weston and James Curwen.

And with its senior online and tech teams in Gibraltar and Leeds complete, Superbet’s attention can now fully turn to its main task – to build one of the industry’s leading in-house sports betting platforms. “Our main operation is in Romania and while everything else is still a work in progress, there are a lot of things we are doing,” CEO Sacha Dragic tells EGR Intel. “It’s like an iceberg: most of it is invisible now but 2018 is when we will start making progress and all the results should start to appear in 2019.”

It is clearly a critical year for the operator, one which will offer the first signs of whether its decision to adopt its current international strategy will actually pay off. But as Dragic explains, based on its success in its home market and the previous accomplishments of its online team, you wouldn’t want to bet against it.

EGR Intel: What is the history behind Superbet and how did it get started?

Sacha Dragic (SD): Superbet got started in late 2008. Prior to that I was working with Mozzart Sports Bets, which is the number one company in Serbia, and was helping them develop their international operation. We parted ways in 2008, which was when I decided to start my own company. In September 2008, we incorporated the Superbet business, and in January 2009 we opened our first shops, which was the first moment we started creating revenue.

EGR Intel: Which markets does Superbet currently operate in?

SD: We currently only operate in regulated markets and, as of today, that is just Romania and Poland. However, that doesn’t mean we won’t change our policy on regulated and unregulated markets in the future. In Romania, we have a licence for slot machines, retail betting and online, and approximately 99% of all our activities come from this market. In Poland, we started very late towards the end of November 2017 when we opened up our first shops, and finished the year with about 35 retail betting shops. We are now in the process of getting an online licence, which we hope we will have in time for the World Cup.

EGR Intel: How attractive do you think the Romanian market is for operators?

SD: In 2015, Romania initiated some changes which made its legislation quite modern and, in many ways, comparable to the UK and Danish markets. As a result, you have quite a lot of foreign companies operating in Romania now like Unibet, Sportingbet and Betfair. And then of course, there are all the traditional Romanian retail companies that have an online licence, which means there are approximately 25 licensed betting companies in Romania at the minute.

EGR Intel: When did you go live online in Romania?

SD: We went online in February 2016 and were actually one of the last to get our licence. Although we were one of the largest retail operators, we were a bit late starting online because we had a lot of decisions to make about our technology and spent a great deal of time negotiating with different suppliers. We eventually got what we thought was the right combination of third-party suppliers and in-house technology.

EGR Intel: How big is your market share in both retail and online?

SD: In retail we are the clear number one and 10-15% bigger than the combined Fortuna and Hattrick operation, perhaps not by number of shops but definitely by amounts wagered and revenue. Online is a very close competition between Unibet and Superbet, and the number one and two positions tend to be interchangeable. However, we are one of the only traditional retail operators which has such a big share of the online market as well.

“We were a bit late starting online because we had a lot of decisions to make about our technology”

EGR Intel: Are you confident you can replicate your Romanian success in Poland?

SD: Yes, but we know that it will be a long-term approach. We are expecting to lose money there in 2018 and 2019, break even in 2020 and then from 2021 onwards we hope to have a similar success to that in Romania. The Polish market is very similar to the old Romanian market with a turnover tax of 15%, so we are quietly confident that we know how to operate in such an environment.

EGR Intel: What are your international expansion plans for Superbet following launches in Romania and Poland?

SD: This is the big merit of Ralph [Topping] as my advisor and chair of the advisory board. His work with us actually started through LinkedIn which was followed by a discussion, a lunch in London and then visit to us in Romania. Before this, our original plan had been to solely focus on Central Europe in the first few years. But after starting to work with Ralph in late 2016, he persuaded me that, after getting to know Superbet and its internal organisation better, it would be a mistake to wait too long to go for the global digital market because of the qualities we had. He thought we should go much, much faster than I originally intended because I was planning to go for the global market in 2020 or 2021.

EGR Intel: Which markets are you looking at specifically?

SD: After we started to work on Ralph’s proposal, we split the company into three divisions. Firstly, there is the Romanian business, which is our cash cow. Then there is the Central European operation based in Vienna which coordinates all our activities in the region, and after going into Poland, in late 2018 or early 2019, we will also be in Serbia and Slovakia. Finally, we launched our international digital business in Gibraltar and started hiring people there, while the technology team is in Leeds and the guys we hired from bet365 in Watford are heading up the quant team. We have since started building our new online betting platform and are expecting to start online casino in the next six to eight months from Gibraltar too. Hopefully by the end of the year the sportsbook will be ready and then we can start with the new platform in the first countries slowly in December 2018 or January 2019.

EGR Intel: In Serbia and Slovakia, will you be launching retail first and then online later?

SD: The example of Poland shows us we probably made a mistake going retail first. The situation in Central Europe today is very different to when we started in Romania because the customers are much younger and relying more on their mobile phones and apps than ever before. So we expect to do retail and online in Serbia and Slovakia at the same time. This year is an optimistic target, so it might be more realistic to expect to launch in Q1 or beginning of Q2 2019.

EGR Intel: Why have you been so aggressive with your hiring spree? Were you not worried it would be too expensive to recruit such well-known industry talent?

SD: They are not cheap to hire but what we are trying to replicate from our Romanian operation in Central Europe and elsewhere is the quality of the people. That is the most important thing in the business. It’s obviously crucial to have a good platform and things like that, but if you don’t have the best people in your business then it won’t work. So I wanted to hire people who I knew shared the same values as our existing management team and we knew it would take time to integrate all these people. I decided with the shareholders to put a bit more money on the table and have the teams ready some six or nine months earlier than was strictly necessary with the idea that they will help with the Romanian and Central European operations.

This means that when the new platform is ready we will not have lost months and months after just hiring people and getting them to be operationally efficient. I think this will already have been done by then. We really want to understand better from all the companies we’ve hired from and innovate. Our big advantage is that we’re a private company and we do not have the pressures of the markets or shareholders asking us for fast results. We are investing and putting things in place until we get the right results.

EGR Intel: How close do the Gibraltar and Romania teams work together? Do you plan to roll-out a single platform for the whole business?

SD: The end result will be that everything is on the same platform, but at the moment we already have an in-house sportsbook in Romania. When we start operating with the new digital platform in 2019, within the following 12 or 18 months all our other operations across Central Europe will slowly be migrated on to the new platform so that going forward we will only really work with one single tech platform.

“I wanted to hire people who I knew shared the same values as our existing management team and we knew it would take time to integrate all these people”

EGR Intel: Why are you so confident you will be able to deliver a truly innovative online platform?

SD: We have exciting people and I enjoy working with them a lot and seeing how well our old team interacts with the new guys. With people like [director of ecommerce] Jamie [Hart] and [CTO] Finbarr [Joy] we are trying to build something different. I’ve had a lot of people telling me we are just repeating what William Hill did, which is not true at all. We are taking the best experience from all of the guys who have joined us, including what worked and what didn’t work, and then we are looking at what Superbet has done in the past. I can’t be too specific though about the business secrets of the new platform but we are quite optimistic that when the platform is ready it will be more advanced than existing products on the market.

EGR Intel: Have you finished building your senior team now?

SD: [Head of gaming] James Curwen was our latest big hire and he has already started building his own team. At this time we have about 80% of the senior team we will need for the next few years, so I don’t think we will be as aggressive about hiring, at least for the next 12-18 months. We may then restart our hiring process but this time the process will be quite different. We will probably be looking at more specialised areas such as digital and affiliate marketing and people with experience in different geographies that we want to enter into.