Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | April 2010 44 Online Sports All to Play For Inside Asian Gaming speaks to Bill Mummery of online bookmaker SBOBET sponsorship deal withWest Bromwich Albion (WBA) for its televised match against Bristol City in The Championship, the second tier of English professional football. The experiment was designed to measure the impact of live game shirt sponsorship on volumes of in-play betting. Inside Asian Gaming spoke to Bill Mummery, Executive Director of SBOBET, at the recent Asian iGaming Congress (AiG) in Manila, The Philippines. We asked about SBOBET’s experience in Asian markets and where the main business opportunities would arise for the company during the remainder of 2010. Inside Asian Gaming: Jose Mari Ponce, Administrator and CEOof theCagayanEconomicZoneAuthority, saidrecently he thought the most successful Western online operators in Asia were those with a strong customer database. Is that enough? What about the personal relationship provided to many Chinese gamblers by the gambling agents and their understanding of Chinese and other Asian-focused bookmaking and market making? Bill Mummery: Clearly a strong database is important, but the history of recent years is littered with some of the bigWestern brands that simply didn’t succeed in these totally different markets. I don’t think that the Western culture is naturally good at taking the time and making the investment to understand these markets in depth; the player, product, and service levels demanded—all of which are quite different [from Western markets]. Conversely, I think that a significant part of the success of operators from the Far East in moving towards Europe is that they do these things [learning about the local market] better. IAG : Is it possible or even desirable for Western operators to copy or mimic the business practices of the Asian online operators if they don’t have full insight into that system? BM: I don’t think it is necessarily appropriate or relevant, except in educatingWestern bettors as to some of the [alternative] methods of betting. Once the Western players understand the value proposition of Asian handicap betting [for soccer] that has made that product so popular in Asia, that’s likely to provide a significant shift [in the business structure of the Western industry]. S BOBET.com , an online sports book licensed in the Isle of Man and the Philippines, has built a reputation for innovation in the Internet betting industry, with a strong client base in Asia. One of the reasons is SBOBET’s experience at bookmaking for in-play betting, one of the most popular forms of gambling in Asia. In February, SBOBET did a one-game only soccer shirt Bill Mummery