Q&A: Fredrik Elmqvist, CEO, Yggdrasil Gaming

An eventful H1 has seen Yggdrasil Gaming expanding at a pace, having rolled out content with a number of tier one firms such as bet365 and bwin.party, while new customers and staff numbers continue to soar.

Speaking to EGR after the firm posted a significant increase in revenues to SEK34.1m (£3m) for the first half of the year, Yggdrasil Gaming CEO Fredrik Elmqvist said he wouldn’t be getting carried away, particularly with the firm in what he described as a “volatile phase of expansion”.

“I’m afraid of building up too much expectation, so we need to look at things in more of a long-term way,” Elmqvist told EGR.

“I don’t want people to get over excited and expect things to be like this all the time as it won’t be possible.”

Nonetheless, the company continues to grow and EGR quizzes the CEO on what’s next for the firm and how it’s adapting to rising client demand.

eGaming Review (EGR): In what was an eventful first half of the year for the company, what was your highlight of the period?

Fredrik Elmqvist (FE): I would say launching the new Cash Race functionality. It’s important for us to provide all these promotional tools and take a holistic view with the player experience. We’re happy to get it up and running ahead of the European Championships for the opening game, that was quite an accomplishment. Looking at how it has been received by the operators, I believe it has become a household promotional tool pretty quickly. As a cross-promotional tool between sportsbook and casino seems to be working.

Of course, getting the Gibrlatar licence finalised too was a highlight. There’s a lot of opportunities there, we have more and less taken everything possible in Malta.

EGR: Your target now turns to new acquiring new business, can you give us any indication as to where your looking to expand into?

FE: It’s about expanding and fully leveraging on what we have now, and what we have invested in Gibraltar. We’ve invested in our office and infrastructure there. We are recruiting people to our Gibraltar office and that is going to be one of the focus areas for the coming quarters, to move forward in that jurisdiction.

We know it has its challenges because we know the operators in that region the prospect of going through consolidation, so even though we might be able to land a contract shortly, it might take time to get integration down, but that’s just how it is.

EGR: You’ve changed the way you recruit people and integrate people into the business, what changes are these? Do you find it difficult to find the right people to join the business?

FE: It’s a small change from our end, but will still have a big impact on us. We haven’t had anyone internally who works within talent recruitment, previously this was done by our own managers, but it comes to a point where there needs to be more support for talent recruitment. We used to be a small company, and now we have grown to a bigger company, we’ve hired someone to come in and take care of that and make sure we are doing the right assessments beforehand.

I think you can easily find people who have been around for a long time, but sometimes they come with luggage. It’s a fine balance of having experience but not someone who comes with a fixed mind of how things should be.

EGR: Yggdrasil appointed its first financial director, Frida Gustafsson, during H1, what was the thinking behind this?

FE: We’re growing and we need to have more control internally, and of course moving forward to secure our long-term targets and strategies, we needed to have a finance director. We started off out sourcing everything, but we are gradually taking aspects back under our control.

EGR: Mobile gaming has grown to 48% of total GGR, what’s driving this?

FE: It’s actually a consequence of our 360° approach and our iSENSE 2.0 client framework is helping to drive the usage from mobile. We don’t focus on mobile, but the framework is providing really quick downloading speed on mobile. It has a nice user interface and there’s been an uptake in mobile players because they like it.

EGR: What emerging trends and challenges are you facing?

FE: I think what’s going to be interesting is what happens with Google Chrome and Flash, and see how hard it is for Flash to survive in Chrome and how it’s going to impact the players in the first half of next year. Some are addressing this challenge head on, some don’t anticipate it will have such a big impact, but I think it will have a big impact. We are ready for it. We haven’t produced a Flash game since December 2014, but it’s going to be interesting to see the impact it will have.

EGR: What is Yggdrasil’s focus for the next six to 12 months?

FE: It’s just to keep rolling things out. Gibraltar is a focus for us, expanding into regulated markets in Europe and we’re assessing a few options at the moment. And of course, new products to separate us from the rest – to provide a new, holistic player experience.