How does BETER’s position today compare to where it was on January 1st?
Over the course of the past 12 months, we’ve faced our biggest challenges to date, which we have overcome thanks to the enormous effort, dedication, courage and support of our team. What’s more, we’ve not only overcome such obstacles, but turned them into opportunities which we’ve used to grow stronger than ever before.
We started this year with an ambitious development roadmap oriented towards successful operating and competing in a saturated, highly competitive igaming industry. It also contained some worse-case scenarios due to the nature of relations between Ukraine and Russia during the last years. But at that point, it was completely unthinkable that Russia would launch a full-blown military invasion in Ukraine, where most of our assets and employees are located.
We had to do some changes to our strategy literally on the run, ensuring the safety of each member of our team, whilst also finding ways to mitigate risks and ensure our sports arenas, live casino studios, as well as the wider business as a whole, kept on functioning as usual.
I am exceptionally grateful to our team for helping us achieve what we once thought was impossible. Not only have we managed to achieve all of the above, but we are finishing the year stronger than ever, with significant growth across all of our product lines. Today BETER continues to develop new disciplines, open new venues, and increase our presence in Europe.
Across each of the BETER verticals and areas of business, what have been the outstanding highlights of 2022?
Our main goals were to do more in every key aspect of our strategy – have more content, a more diverse range of sports disciplines, a wider geographical presence and penetrate new markets. We managed to almost double our sports and esports content production, as well as develop a library of 14 live casino games, some of which are quite unique.
We were also working hard to strengthen our partnerships within the industry and onboarded over 30 new clients. They appreciated our world-class portfolio, reliable odds, the highest uptime and enhanced the integrity of our sports and esports tournaments.
One of the most prominent events for us is the expansion of our cooperation with Bayes Esports, the world’s leading supplier of official esports live data. Bayes Esport chose us as a preferred partner, which supplied them with esports odds for Bayes’ platform, BODEX.
In terms of geographical expansion, we have also moved quite fast, opening table tennis arenas in Moldova, Czech Republic and Poland.
And specifically, which areas have seen the most exciting progress, in terms of both product development and commercial growth?
Perhaps the most dynamic growth of all has been in our flagship vertical, esports, as well as live casino. In 2022, we’ve significantly enhanced our esports portfolio by increasing the number of in-house streams of esports tournaments, which customers can access 24/7 all year round.
What’s more, we also recently added new disciplines such as Volta efootball mode, ehockey, basketball through to our Sports and Esports offering. In total, we now provide over 28,000 of efootball, ebasketball, ehockey and CS:GO events every month, 10,000+ of table tennis matches in addition to covering 400+ global esports tournaments.
We have developed innovative solutions focused on the next-gen esports betting audience and we are constantly arming them with new features. This year saw the launch of our new iFrame solution, which provides a unique user experience that surpasses that offered by more classic sports betting user interfaces. We are also very excited to see that both demand and industry recognition for this solution are constantly growing, which is evidenced by the fact it won a respectable Silver mark at the 2022 SBC Awards for “Industry Innovation of the Year” recently.
What’s more, just several weeks ago we enhanced iFrame with a new statistics widget, which makes it even more interesting as it helps esports’ fans to make more balanced betting decisions and increases event betting turnover by around 30% for our operator partners.
As for live casino, we have expanded our game collection to 14 electrifying games which cater to the needs of European and Asian audiences.
2023 is now only few weeks away, how does BETER hope to get the new year off to a flying start?
During the coming months, we’ll continue to develop at breakneck speed. The first quarter 2023 sees the launch of our in-house DOTA 2 tournaments.
We’re also planning to hit the ground running in the new year, as we go live with our new live casino, which will be based in Romania, in January. This studio will work alongside our existing Ukrainian studio to allow us to meet growing demand for live casino products. We are also going to add a new unique game Gravity Roulette.
In short, 2023 is going to be a big year for us as we continue to add new disciplines and develop our company as a leading content provider in the igaming industry.
And the very important starting point will be exhibiting at ICE London 2023 show.
Does BETER have any special plans for the ICE event in London that you can share?
It’s a fantastic opportunity to see all our clients and potential clients face-to-face, so we visit it every year. It was quite obvious already for some time that the scale of our business and jam-packed meeting schedule requires participation with a stand. That was our intention for 2022 but those plans were ruined due to the Russian-Ukrainian war. At last at ICE London 2023 we will make this long-awaited debut and exhibit at our stylish stand our enlarged products portfolio.
We are planning to showcase the offering in all our iGaming verticals, BETER Esports, BETER Sports, BETER Live and BETER Gaming, but a special emphasis will be placed on our esports disciplines and new products from the live casino division. So we invite all our partners and potential partners to book a meeting with us there.
The interview was originally published at Global Gambling News.
