Casino International: You've had a lot of big orders recently, what stands out for you?
Martin Spies: We recently did the new Mega Jackpot signs for Holland Casinos. We made at least one sign for every casino, some of them had two, the larger operations, so in total we made something like 18, and in the signs we had 3D LCDs running. They’re up and running now

CI: You’ve had quite a few other installations over the last quarter of 2008 as well.
MS: Yeah, we had all the IGT Barcrest group in the UK, we did something like 35 signs for them all over the UK, for the Fort Knox product. I think we’re going to do some good business with the UK as well again, we have an order just in for more signs elsewhere.

CI: The plant you've opened in Uruguay is in conjunction with Suzo; how does the partnership with Suzo work, what do they bring to the relationship?
MS: Suzo have a great many contacts in South America, they speak to all the casinos over there. They are acting like our agents in South America, they do all the sales and administration and we make sure that all the technical side is in place.

CI: How do you take care of quality control, with such distance between offices?
MS: We trained the people, the local people. We brought them over to Europe and we trained them over here for a period of two months. Now they’ve gone back, put all the things in place for production in Uruguay in the plant, and now they’re starting off with the first signs to build, they have them now in production.

CI: So they have taken orders already?
MS: Yes, they have orders. We’ve had the first orders now, and also Suzo is speaking to many customers to see where we can put more signs. There’s a lot of business to do over there.

CI: Obviously your key office is in Holland, but eventually the South American business could grow your business significantly. In terms of manufacturing capacity, how much can the Uruguayan arm cope with?
MS: At the moment it’s quite small, but it’s a lot easier than in Europe to find personnel, to find staff. So to grow over there is a lot easier than over here.

CI: Is there any particular reason that you chose Uruguay?
MS: Uruguay has the best opportunities and financial incentives. We are in a free port zone over there so it’s a lot easier to import and export to other countries in South America. If we do it from here it would cost a lot more than to ship it from there and import from South American countries.

CI: There's a new LCD that you’re taking to ICE – what's special about that?
MS: It’s a long stretched 42 inch LCD. So the display has a normal LCD width of a 32" or 42" display, but the height is half a standard LCD. The benefit is that we have a lot of low ceiling height casinos, and we are always struggling and have to come down to a 26 inch or go smaller with LCDs than we actually would like to do. Now with this one we have the opportunity to have it 42" wide but with a lower height, so we can go much easier into a casino and still have very good graphics, great visibility and great style.

CI: Has this been custom made?
MS: Yeah, we developed it together with LG, who we are a distributor for.
We thought that if it was possible to get one like this it would be great, then the European director for LG took it with him to Korea and developed a business plan for it. Now they the first six have been hand-made for us, and it will be in production very soon.
The potential for LG to do well with a screen like this is huge, as there are plenty of places that can use these dimensions like train stations, supermarkets, that kind of place.
Of course, there are other benefits – for example, the weight is obviously only half. Also, if you think of table gaming, now they are still using smaller LCDs or LED displays, and now they can choose a solution with LCD, they can have great graphics on there.

CI: You’ve got some other new product coming to London, including a new jackpot system and Adtraction, which is your digital screen (out-of-home television) solution.
MS: Yeah, you can do like picture in picture with this Adtraction, you can do PowerPoint presentations, so you can show a small image of a television if you want, like soccer or something, and around that you can show other information.
You can use it with the new LCD, for example, on a Roulette display – you can take a small part of the display and show your real-time video stream of the roulette, of the wheel, and then on top of that you can show the numbers that have been pulled out for the last ten rounds or something.

CI: What does 2008 hold for Signs4U?
MS: We are growing faster than we expected the last couple of years, so yeah, we are still expanding as fast as possible. And for the new projects we are seeing coming up, yeah, the new development in Aragon, Gran Scala, will present some opportunities for us. We'll start working on that and with our other customers like the manufacturers we see a lot of new opportunities with the new multi-level progressives that they are sending out now.
Also in Argentina we expect to be one of the major sign suppliers over there in the next two years.

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