Atlantic Lottery Records a Profit of $422-Million
Atlantic Lottery made $422-million in profits for the 2016/2017 fiscal year, the corporation’s CEO announced at a business lunch in Charlottetown on Monday.
“We’re about $60-million ahead of where we were five years ago,” said president and CEO Brent Scrimshaw in an interview, “So it’s not a one-time result. [We’re] showing year-over-year growth in profits.”
Atlantic Lottery has been able to grow despite the increasing popularity of online gaming opportunities that have broken up the monopolies that once dominated regional gaming markets.
There’s no question there’s new competition,” he said. “For a long time now I’ve been saying that the monopoly that a lot of companies enjoyed is all but over. And the competition we’re facing is both domestic, in some cases, and more importantly, international.”
“Lotteries are very old successful companies. But we’re in a very different market than we were even five years ago, and I think we’ve been reasonably successful at adapting our operations to that new environment.”
Atlantic Lottery has experienced growing revenues and profits in part, he says, because of new products like Lotto Max that have a higher price point than the old products. But Scrimshaw also credits the culture of innovation they’ve developed at the company.
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The company has a product development partnership with Volta Labs in Halifax, and they also have an innovation hub at the head office in Moncton.
Lotteries are a mature industry, or a mature product category,” said Scrimshaw. “We don’t subscribe to that here…We’re breaking away from the mould and have embraced innovation in a very significant way.”
“I’m blown away with what these teams have produced in a short period of time. They’re going from idea to prototype in a matter of weeks. What’s more important is they’re grounding their work on some really neat player insight.”
Scrimshaw said they’ll be introducing some of those games over the course of the next year on the company’s new digital platform, which is being rolled out this week
“These new systems put us in a place where we can compete with anyone in the world,” he said. “Our challenge is we are by charter a company that works in the four Atlantic provinces. But the offerings that we come forward with have to compete with what’s coming out from those companies that have the globe as their marketplace.”
Those international companies are also unregulated and don’t have a mandate to be socially responsible, but Scrimshaw said they still must be able to compete, and are successfully doing so.
“That $422-million goes 100 percent back to our shareholders, the provinces,” he said. “By mandate, and by culture, our products are built to be safe and responsible. That’s our DNA and that’s not necessarily the case with those companies from Malta and Gibraltar and the like.”
“[But consumers] want products they enjoy, at the end of the day. Our responsibility is to tell the story. But we won’t win in the marketplace by telling a story purely that their dollars stay here. We have to be competitive.”