Fournier as a company works hard to maintain a spotless reputation. With a history steeped in playing cards and as a worldwide leader, it’s sometimes hard to see where such a company could expand and develop. But with the staff they have and their attitude to their work, Fournier should remain dominant for years to come.

The company is based in the lovely city of Vitoria, seated near Bilbao and enjoying close proximity to the Rioja wine region the area is famed for. But Vitoria itself, Javier and Jesus tell me, is known as the playing card city, because of its close associations historically – and of course currently – with Fournier.

In the playing card world, Fournier has about 85% of the European market, with near total domination in Africa too. In Latin America, they boast 70 to 75% of the market, which is outstanding for any company. The only reason they don’t boast similar numbers in America is that Fournier is owned by the United States Playing Card Company, so they do not trade in North America. With that in mind, the group that owns Fournier is by far the world leader in playing cards. Javier and Jesus answered questions and explained to Jon Bruford the company’s philosophy.

Casino International: So the group Fournier is part of is number one worldwide, you are number one in the territories you operate in – how do you grow?

Javier Berasategui: Good question. We grow if the market is growing, because more and more casinos are opening, more and more resorts are opening, for all the hotel industry, the tourist industry is growing worldwide. And then as a part of the luxury tourist industry a casino fits in all the five-star hotels and big luxury resorts. The market for casinos worldwide is growing and still many countries are to come, like in Asia it’s just opening up and in South America, Brazil, in Central America Mexico, countries to be opened up some day, it’s a matter of time. The market is growing and we are growing with the market; but when you’ve got such a big percentage in something, it’s a question we’ve asked ourselves many times: how to grow because you are the big leader. The only thing that could happen to you is you lose market share, some competitor comes and so on, still we are keeping very steadily the market share, but still we are growing.

Jesus Guerra: Still the markets in Eastern European markets like Russia, Greece and all these European countries has grown a lot and we have grown a lot as well, and we have been open to growth.

JB: We are always eyes-open to any new opportunities worldwide, like Indonesia could be opening now, what’s going on in Brazil, what’s going on with Mexico, always keeping our eyes open; Chile, there are now licenses for Chile, then go for it!

CI: How can cards develop? To players, a card is a card, so is the development and the future growth, the solidity of the product, dependent on researching into materials and the printing process in order to maintain and increase the security? And how quickly, are you reliant on printing technologies, how active are you in developing your own technologies to take your cards forward?

JG: We were the first to start into plastics, making casino quality plastic cards. If you’re making casino quality plastic cards, you can use UV inks, and with UV inks you can apply for invisible barcodes and many gimmicks, many of the things that you apply to money, to currency, on any bank note, all the hidden numbers and so on that goes into a bank note can be applied to the playing card. Technology for RFID, which is now so fashionable, that goes with chips and so, they are smaller and smaller and one day could be so small it could be applied in playing cards. Who knows?

JB: We will adapt ourselves to the need of the casino. What happened in the past, they needed shuffling machines, they saw the need so they talked to the producer of those machines and they needed playing cards suitable for this machine, and we had that technology. In order to do that we had to start producing high quality 100% plastic cards. The new revolution in the casino tables might be intelligent systems, that some companies have already started to produce. We will be ready for these fresh challenges though, as we have been in the past.

CI: How much of your time or turnover do you devote to research and development? As you said, if banknotes can do something, huge investment goes into banknote security and you can have benefit vicariously from that. So do you find you don’t have to put a lot of investment into it, more that you have to be very alert?

JG: Correct, in general, to know how to apply the technology to the product.

JB: We look for very much the banknotes, because as we say we don’t print cards we print the money. We are just following the same processes as some of the money makers, just applied to our cards and then different inks in terms of hidden notage and so on.

JG: And always trying to incorporate new things, of course that has to be accepted by our customer. There are many things that we could do, but not at a price which would be acceptable to our customer, that’s always the balance that we have to try strike.

CI: Say for example I was opening a new independent casino, and needed enough playing cards to last me for a year. I’ve got 16 gaming tables, maybe 12 of which are card based. How long would it take you to fulfil my order, and how is the order fulfilled from initial contact?

JB: Normally casino managers they know the quantity they use in a year more or less because of experience, and we can talk about their security procedures and so on, and how they would like to use the card and by that we make an estimation of the total amount for the year. Then we act very quickly, they send us the logo and we produce the artwork. In three or four days we are ready to start the action, which takes a maximum of four weeks, but the average is three weeks. In three weeks we have the product ready and then depending on the country we will deliver it sooner or later, in the EU it’s a matter of days three or four days. So the total procedure is very fast, because we have all the procedures well established, this is what we do every day.

JG: We always make sure that each element has been signed off by the operator – different faces on the cards, the back of the card, each thing has to be signed off so there is no chance of any misunderstanding, each time the operator sees a picture of what we mean.

JB: The casino logo, we keep it in a safe, on CD. Everything else, we take out of the computers for security reasons. Once the production run is finished we destroy the plate, and then we don’t keep anything. It’s like in a casino that we make every year; each order is like we start over again. It’s like everything is new, why, because we don’t keep records of anything for security reasons. In terms of security we destroy everything. For security it makes sense because casinos they know that nothing could happen at the factories, they can be 100% sure nothing could happen inside Fournier. The logo will be in our safe and nothing else.

CI: How much of your waste is recycled?

JB: We recycle everything, we destroy it. There is a shredding machine inside the factory and what is left over from the manufacturing process, any mistakes or waste, we send it to the shredding machine and at the end everything gets shredded, totally shredded and we send it for recycling. Everything is recycled that we do.

CI: How do you take care of after-sales? I know you have very strong client relationships.

JB: Our recipe is to always sort all the problems and have everybody happy. So when we have a complaint – and we don’t get many complaints, but if we did get one what we would do is request for the people to send us a sample.

JG: But we can just go back tracking through the whole manufacturing process thanks to a number which shows in the whole deck of cards, we can follow up what happened with that manufacturing process. Out of a launch of 3000, 122 were rejected, one got destroyed blah, blah, and we would deliver 2135 decks. If we manufactured from Tuesday to Wednesday and then the following Monday, we have a tracking service so you know every step of the whole process. On top of that, you say okay, and then you’d check to see if something else happened that day which could have affected the outcome, something due to the water process or was it something that went wrong with the inks, because sometimes it’s not anything in Fournier, maybe it’s the ink manufacturer and then it’s identified.

JB: I know sometimes the problem has been created inside the casino by the employees trying to cheat the casino. So we give samples because they may have scanned the decks, the cards or whatever, sending samples out will check it. The first thing we will do is to define whether the problem started in the casino, if someone has been marking them and then with our technology we can identify easily whether the marking was before the varnish or on top of the varnish. Our technicians can say very easily ‘okay that was a mistake’, or sometimes they send us samples and we can see those cards have been used many times. If there is a manufacturing fault you must send me nonused cards and used cards where you can see this manufacturing fault.

JG: Or maybe, maybe they even don’t know because maybe they find that something goes wrong after being two, three weeks of usage on the tables and it’s the moment they identify the problem, but then the cards have been used for two weeks and then the casino only wants to know. And as we are the expert we just say send the cards and what do you think was wrong, I found this, please let me know what’s your opinion. And in this we are very, very honest and open people. Why, because we are going to meet the same casino next year and the following year and the following year, and it’s not a matter of giving silly answers but a matter of responding professionally. Why? Because he’s going to meet us in casino and he’s going to need our service and it’s a small business where prestige is a matter of looking after the details. When you look at details and details and details you get success. It is how to manage the details and not do stupid things, just be very professional.

JB: You may have problems, you may make mistakes because we are human beings all of us, but the way you treat a mistake is the difference. You honestly try to find out the truth and if you see this is your mistake and you have to repeat the order, whatever, at the end that will reinforce your relationship with the casino, with the customer.

JG: But again out of 18 million decks of cards I think we got 12 complaints. Out of 18 million and multiplied by 52 cards.

CI: You’re right that’s pretty bad, 12 complaints…

JG: In the casino all our cards are checked, so the smallest mistake they are going to see it, that’s why we are quite sure that the quality we are serving up is very good. Otherwise you are in the casino checking all the cards to see if you are sending problems. Our company has almost 140 years of history, and when you have a company with a long history you don’t care about a couple of thousand pounds more or less, it’s not so important.

JB: It’s more a matter of partnership, we see casinos as partners. It’s more a case of ‘I’m going to be dealing with you this year, the following year. Let’s just be honest and open and be great partners.

CI: How effective are trade shows for you?

JB: In Eastern European countries, normally our first strategy is to go directly to casinos to have a relationship wherever we can and whenever we can. What happens in some countries in Eastern Europe, because of the difficulties of importing products to these countries we cooperate with distributors locally and we are very, very happy with them.

JG: For these casinos they’ve got many questions to ask, because they may be new in business, because they just opened a casino like one year ago and they don’t know much about the casino business and then we can talk to the finance guys, to the casino manager, to the gaming manager, I’ll say we behave like this, you should be doing that. You have to go through this because that’s the way it is in this market. Then regarding the shows depending on which area of the world you are the London show is more about innovation, it’s image, the Las Vegas Show it’s more image than innovation, but when you go to Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Moscow it’s more selling. It’s a new business, a new market and they are eyes wide open just wanting to learn, they want to know what’s going on.

JB: The one we have in Greece, and Turkey and I met an English guy, and he was saying to me ‘Since I started in this business, I have always used Fournier,’ and in the rest of the European countries, Africa, even Latin America, it’s similar; you talk to any casino manager and they have grown up with our playing cards. But with the Eastern Europeans there are many new people who are coming into the business and they don’t have that background.

JG: We can explain that this is the way cards should look, we can take care of the slipperiness level, the snap, the behaviour in the shuffling machines and so on, because it’s a good growing process for these guys. Just to know that then you can buy good cards, medium priced cards or cheap cards, it’s up to you but…

CI: …You should know what you are buying?

JG: You should know the performance of each card and what your expectations of it are. JB: In some countries you face the reality of hearing: ‘I love your product but I cannot afford it because it’s in this country, I need something cheap but the day I can afford it I will buy your product’, you just have to accept that.

CI: What are your unique selling points over all of your rivals?

JB: Firstly we should talk of the security of the product. The way we produce our playing cards is unique in the business. We take care of all the smaller details, ensuring the printing is perfect by using our very careful process, checking after printing and all the different quality controls. The process we use is unique, and the way we administer to the product. The punching again is unique; cutting one cards one by one is the only way of ensuring all the cards are exactly the same size. It’s a big problem with security if there is one card which is not the right size or is not a perfect centre, a marked card or any fault. Then talking more deeply about security is the way we pack the packaging; we send 12 or 16 with a special hauler, shrink wrapped and also with the carton we send 144 decks, each with security strips. What we do is to make it very difficult for anyone to touch the decks before they are at the casino. Also we have insurance that covers the sending, from our warehouse to the casino. If a single deck is stolen or if a deck is lost the insurance will cover the whole order.

JG: The replacement will be a different colour and the casino can be 100% sure that no security concern at all is involved because we’ll take care of that no problem. If something goes wrong in customs, no problem, we take care of that. We try to make life easy for the casinos because they’ve got so many problems; they’ve got so many different issues to deal with. We always say forget the cards, you’ve got so many different areas to have to take care of, you’ve got so many issues, so forget about the cards because it’s our business. We are experts on the cards, anything regarding cards, why just send us over, just sign our acknowledgment and forget it. You know Fournier will take care of it.

JB: With Fournier you can have sweet dreams, we work hard to make that true.

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