Suzo International continues to place focus on increasing relations with European casinos. Having built very strong business relations over fifty years with European OEM’s, the natural step was to increase Suzo’s presence with the European casinos. Following on from the AESI’s success in the USA (a company within the Suzo-Happ Group), Suzo International has learnt the benefits that can be brought by building direct casino relations.

The first step was to bring together a range of world-class casino products. Casinos can benefit from being able to choose from a very wide product range. The second stage was to create a catalogue specifically for casinos. The Casino Catalogue 2008 from Suzo International underlines this focus. The third step was to create a strong European Casino Team.

Let’s look at this last point first. Erik Wijma leads the Casino Team with many years of experience. His previous position as Sales Manager for France, Italy and Switzerland brought his first steps into the casino market. Erik explains how this came about, “As gaming OEM’s are minimal in France it was natural for me to turn directly to the casinos, given that France boasts the largest number of casino slots in Western Europe. Here I learnt the benefits for both the casinos and Suzo from creating direct business relations. With AESI joining the Suzo-Happ Group, this allowed us to further enhance our strategy”.

Erik has a team of three to help him support the European casino market. Whilst Erik continues to focus on the countries in Western Europe, he can look on the support from two sales colleagues. Mathias Reindl is the Regional Sales Manager for Central and Eastern Europe and Joost van Egeraat is the Regional Sales Manager for Southern Europe. Their professional backgrounds differ but blend in to provide Suzo a whole wealth of experience. Austrian-born Mathias lives in Germany, having had nine years of experience working in Spain. Having gained experience in a global company such as Siemens, he then joined the gaming industry three years ago to become sales manager at Starpoint. With Starpoint now being a part of the Suzo-Happ Group, Mathias has taken on the challenge to support the casino customers in his regions. Thus, Mathias brings a wealth of experience from the components side. Joost, on the other hand, brings a wealth of experience from the manufacturing side. Joost has joined Suzo from Orion and this OEM background brings an essential advantage to the casino group.

A major pillar in the raison d être of the Suzo casino group is to provide professional service. Here Erik has turned to Marc Martens who joined Suzo from the photo-processing market. Marc’s experience has been to offer practical, on-site service to his customers. He relishes challenges and states himself the importance of knowing the customers. Therefore, casino customers can look forward to dealing with Marc’s uncomplicated, solution-oriented approach.

So now we’ve seen the team, let’s look back to the Suzo product range. The casino catalogue is 65 pages long, thus underlining the strength in depth of the Suzo product range. However, offering the right products is only part of the Suzo casino strategy, as Erik explains, “we seek to bring innovation to the market. This, coupled with our outstanding service, is where we see our unique selling point. It is our stated goal to bring benefits to the casino market”.

But how do Erik and his team intend to do this? The example of strategic partnerships explains this. Strategic relationships with FutureLogic and MEI allow Suzo International to bring the benefits of these products within the European casino market. Both companies have proven its technological strengths in their home markets – namely the USA. Suzo is transferring this know-how to the European casinos who are seeing the benefits of having these products fitted as standard within the slots. Casinos thus have direct links to new component technology and with the service that Suzo offers know that they can rely on these components during their life usage within the slots. Many casinos within Europe have successfully trialed the MEI Cashflow SC83 banknote reader in value-added trials (VAT’s). With the increasing importance of TITO in Europe, casinos appreciate the benefits of using the market leader FutureLogic.

The Suzo casino team is increasing its dialogue with casinos in traditional gaming as well. Suzo-Happ is the official distributor for Elixir Gaming so can offer a whole range of table solutions with the Chip Washer, Deck Checker, RandomPlus Shuffler and ShufflePro.

Erik Wijma sums up the new casino group, “we are providing world class products to the casino market. We are constantly looking to improve our products for the benefit of the market. Our toppers are a prime example with new Xenon technology toppers that can be linked together. We focus on market leaders for our strategic partnerships and thus can offer the casino market the excellent benefits in note and ticket handling with MEI and FutureLogic. (E-04.07.08)

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