Elektroncek was established in 1989, but only started its gaming interests around 1997. While their ideas seem fresh and their approach energetic, this year was their 11th exhibiting at the ICE show. The Interblock brand came to the market in 1997 with their first product, called Princess, which was sold in Hungary and Slovenia, which is also their base.

From here, their market expanded into Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia, even as far as Holland and western Europe in the following years. In 2005, Aristocrat bought a 50 per cent stake in the company, marking it as one to watch in the global gaming market. Jon Bruford finds out exactly what makes this company tick…

Casino International: What makes your company special, do you think? What makes you unique compared to the many other companies making multi-player games?

Joc Pececnik: It’s very difficult to explain in a very short time what is different but I think that any visitor to ICE can feel and see the difference looking at just the product. If we’re talking about the design, you see the designs of machines which we call G4 Organic, it’s completely different, like it’s ready for the future, but ready to use; regarding the technical issue I can say that we have many, many new solutions inside multiplayer industry, and many new patents on those solutions that make us special.

One very well accepted new product at this show is our electromechanical Blackjack which is actually really an innovative product, nobody has this kind at the moment. And then we have a lot of news regarding existing multiplayer solutions, for example we have a new machine which we call Organic Twins, we can install two or even more mechanical generators around one machine and the player can choose which game they will play or they can play all games at once, this is really innovative and this is a patent. Then we have a couple of very important technical issues, like underglass technology for touch screen which means nobody can destroy our play-station with coins or keys while they’re playing. And we have also renovated other new products like our Roulette game, Bingo, we have a carbon fiber reel and lots of other things…

CI: So what is the idea behind the Organics concept?

JP: If you followed our promotion for the last six months, the Organic [also known as G4, fourth generation] design is based on a special philosophy. The designers of Organic believe that people’s philosophy is becoming more and more machine-oriented, there exists a special relationship between people and machines, and people spend a lot of time looking at the machines all around us.

If you look at yourself, you are using constantly your mobile telephone and your car, so you kind of live between machines and organic. The philosophy of Organic is that the machines become human, become organic, you understand? So that was the idea, the base for design and this design really shows what we talking about; a new world, a new dimension in the 21st century and I think people really like it because the design uses soft lines and is very, very futuristic.

CI: What has the introduction of Aristocrat actually meant for the company?

Tomaz Zvipelj: As with every partnership it certainly required some changes and restructuring, reorganization or repositioning of our activities.

It’s been a year since Aristocrat became our partner, and we are quite happy that the first part of the transition and the hardest part of that process is now finished.

We quite successfully divided the activities between the companies, so Elektroncek and its group of companies are responsible for R&D and for production and distribution in Europe and in Asia, while Aristocrat and its subsidiaries is responsible for distributing product in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and North America. Also, we now have a mutual presence on most of the world shows and exhibitions and so on.

CI: Some of the acquisitions Aristocrat has made, Ace and Interblock, PokerTek as well, it’s really broadened what Aristocrat can offer. You’ve acquired or backed a lot of very interesting technology and a lot of interesting innovation, particularly with Interblock. What does that mean for Aristocrat?

John Wilson: It means that in certain parts of the world we can almost be a one-stop shop. For a venue that’s looking for maybe 150 stations, we can go and offer slot machines, we can offer Roulette, Baccarat, Blackjack, Poker and a system, and a lot of the operators have a preference for dealing with one operator in some parts of the world.

CI: That’s a large outlay for Aristocrat in the little more than 12 months. You’ve got 50% of Elektron?ek, you own Ace outright…

JW: That’s right, but to develop the sort of product that Joc and Tomaz and his team would develop would cost us ten times as much and we wouldn’t have done as good a job, so if you look at it from that perspective, the outlay makes a lot of sense. There’s no possibility that we would have had the expertise to produce the type of product that Interblock has.

JP: Also, Aristocrat has saved a lot of time because we’ve provided a ready product.

CI: So what is the plan in the medium term for your partnership?

JW: The G3 line has certainly got a lot of legs on the main three markets, so we are probably looking at so as far as Aristocrat goes, redistributing in North America, Australasia, South Africa. The G3 product’s largely new to them, and I believe it’s got several years of life in it.

CI: John, what’s the feedback been like in North America? Interblock’s line looks so different from anything else out there, has it raised a few eyebrows?

JW: I don’t think they’ve seen anything of this quality. In South Africa. for example. the operators called this one of the novelty games – I think Interblock took it miles past that several years ago, so that’s the barrier in some parts of the world that we’re needing to knock over, that attitude that games of this quality and innovation are novelties.

JP: We can measure our industry with the cash in the cash box, so our boxes are pretty full in our part of the world. We are delivering machines to Macau and you know that’s the world’s fastest-growing market; we have a near-monopoly over there, with 99 per cent of the market.

So we will continue with the G3 in 2007 and 2008 but in September, we will start to supply our first customers with Organic.

CI: Is there any plan for Interblock to develop specific products for north America, or for any other territory for that matter? Or is it going to be a question of simply taking your existing product and introducing it to that market?

JP: All our products are developed for particular markets. Look around and you will see that Sic-Bo in Canada compared to Macau is two different games. We always respect the local environment, and information from local distributors and operators. We collect this information and we develop that special product for a particular part of the world, or sometimes for a particular city like in Macau.

CI: What has been the highlight of the last few years then, with all the changes you have seen at Interblock?

TZ: What we are particularly proud of is the consistency of growth of both revenues and the machines produced, and we are particularly happy with 2006 as we have really conquered the global market with our products. You don’t have to use the future tense when speaking about how we will go to North America, because we are already there and we are very happy that together with Aristocrat we can also say that we have a 24/7 support globally, we are particularly proud of that. For all those reasons we see our future as a pretty bright one, it gives us a lot of motivation and gives us a lot of prospects to grow in the future.

CI: You’ve gone from a largely European manufacturer to being so much more in quite a short space of time. With such expansion, it must be difficult to balance growth against operating costs. Has that been tough?

TZ: There were some challenges but we have now, I can say successfully, overcome them two and a half to three years ago. What we were aiming for is not year on year 200 per cent growth, but persistent growth on the year, which on average is about 47% year on year.

With this consistency we always have the time to predict the future and get ourselves prepared for it from the point of view of cash flow point of view, the technical side, marketing, production, facilities and everything else.

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