The gaming industry in Malta continued to advance steadily during the first half of 2016, in  spite of a downturn in global activity in 2015 and indications of flat revenues in major international markets last year. Employment rose by 31 per cent during the first half of 2016, and the economic value added was still 12 per cent of GDP. The Business Observer looked at some of the pressures this places on the sector.

Gaming Malta Foundation

Christian Sammut
chairman

GamingMalta was set up as an independent non-profit foundation by the government of Malta and the Malta Gaming Authority.

Malta is truly a centre of excellence in the remote gaming sector globally and all our efforts are tuned to continue spreading this message and ultimately accelerate the sectors’ growth.  But accelerating growth can only happen if we continue to foster the current ecosystem.

Liaising with the local relevant authorities to improve Malta’s attractiveness as a jurisdiction, while spearheading efforts to enhance the ecosystem surrounding the gaming industry, remains at the forefront of our efforts. We are also tasked with the remit to promote the digital gaming industry, which is often overlooked locally. There are a number of international success stories which were born in Malta.

We’re on the road most of the year, exhibiting at large international sector events, coupled with face to face meetings with key stakeholders to create a constant open communication.

We have already exhibited in Berlin, Israel, Migs & Sigma in Malta, Ice in London and as we are currently at the Asean Gaming Summit in Manila.

On the local front, we areworking with key stakeholders within the public sector on day-to-day issues which serves as best practice of how we can continue doing this on an ongoing basis.

For example we have collaborated closely with Identity Malta to start offering a personalised service from this agency at our Smart City offices for the sector. This had quite a positive response from the industry.

With Malta Enterprise we have started collaborating closely with the video gaming industry’s locally-based operators.

Expect more thought leadership events, a specific sector focused conference, information sessions with key public sector entities and targeted promotional efforts.

BMIT

Jack Mizzi
chief marketing and business development officer

How has BMIT’s investment over the years helped the gaming and financial services industry to grow?

Over these last years, we have made substantial investments in our infrastructure, starting from our cloud platform, and proceeding to our investments in a new high-capacity and redundant international network, new data centre presence in Italy and Germany, as well as our new data centre in Smart City.  Indeed, these investments spelt great news for our clients in the gaming and financial services industries.

BMIT customers are now benefitting from up to 40Gbps of internet connectivity, as well as a superior, multi-tiered DDOS protection and mitigation system. This one-of-a-kind set-up in Malta provides our customers with a much better performance, lower latency and higher capacity, at lower costs. Building on our strong infrastructural foundations, we have increased our portfolio of productivity tools for businesses, such as Office 365 and Hosted Exchange.

Also, our systems allow for our clients to adopt a pay-per-use model, which means that they never pay for what they do not use and can scale up their infrastructure as their business grows, not to mention the fact that they avoid large capex costs which can stunt business’ growth in their early days.

RSM

Vladimiro Comodini
partner

Although the direct benefits of having gaming companies in Malta are well known, they also create indirect jobs. Could you give us an indication of the other parts of the economy that benefit?

When an industry is passing through a steep growth phase, as the remote gaming industry in Malta has been doing for several years, associated professional and support services tend to reap benefits as well. This is a reality that can be witnessed in the current local market landscape. RSM is constantly receiving interest from existing and prospective clients for general professional services, ranging from company formations, tax services, accounting, payroll and audit.

The gaming industry has been very active in mergers and acquisitions, hence – due to our extensive gaming portfolio – the firm has also witnessed an increase in requests for due diligence engagements and transaction support.

A third pillar of high activity for the firm relates to compliance and licensing of gaming companies. We handhold our clients from the early stages of filing a licence application all the way through to ongoing compliance requirements.

As a gaming hub, there are other benefits to the wider economy too. Residential, office property sales and rental opportunities are booming across many different property brackets. Expats living in Malta tend to positively impact the economic cycle through their lifestyles, by spending at restaurants, cafes, education, groceries, transport services, telecoms and on other social or lifestyle choices.

LeoVegas

Roderick Spiteri Schillig
head of communication

How does a gaming company attract employees in a market where there is so much choice for them? In other words, how does a gaming company strengthen employer branding?

The short-version answer to this is: by caring. Caring for our people means that at LeoVegas we place our people at the core of our operations, and not vice-versa; we believe that a company is defined by the great people it is made up of.

We consider LeoVegas as a young entertainment company (the average age is 30 years) and while professionalism is a key component in everything we do, we also value the fun and friendly culture we have successfully instilled among employees.

Caring also means that we offer some of the best employee benefits in Malta including fully-paid private health insurance, sports allowances, fitness classes, a healthy snack bar that is always packed with free snacks and fruits and a scrumptious breakfast every Friday. We also offer tons of opportunities for our employees to further improve their skills and to better their position within the company.

To further infuse the fun and friendly culture we organise various fun and adventurous staff events throughout the year.

Caring means that you have to work hard to keep people happy, healthy and fit by providing a fun and flexible working environment. An internal survey at LeoVegas shows that a whopping 90 per cent of our workforce would recommend a career at LeoVegas to their family and friends.