Before we let Pontus go, we have a lovely person to join us on stage, which is Big Sand, the CEO of Big Sand and Associates. And for you all, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them at the end of this segment. The floor is yours.
Thank you. Hello everyone. Can you hear me? Yes. Lovely to see you now. I was having my back to you all. So, hello. And once again, thank you to BC for having all of us. It's lovely here. And Pont, I know you so well. And I've been a fan of that simple reason that you were one of our first licences back in 12.
Yeah, thank you for that.
Yeah, we're hanging in there. Yeah.
Take that as a compliment.
For especially Anders and his team.
So, that's great. We need operators to be licensed and stay on in the country, right?
Yeah. So, we're going to reflect a little bit and ultimately it's about making all of us remember and reflect on what you just told us, right?
Yeah, closer. Yeah. Or I can speak.
So, we spoke about the Nordic country's five speeds.
And when you say something like that, it just Woo. It sounds so bad having five different speeds in such a small area in the world, right?
How does it look like for an operator to have these? I mean, you're used to different kind of speeds in Europe and everywhere. So, is it a special problem for you?
I don't think it's a special problem, but I think we maybe we expected the Nordics to be a little bit more forward-leaning and being faster because we have adopted it and the infrastructure very early and as you said we have functioning states that know how to regulate. So it's a little bit, but so that's on the one hand. On the other hand, we know that all Nordic companies love their monopolies and that is what has been pulling them back. And I think Finland has struggled and wants to keep the monopoly as long as it can, but now it has to give up.
Right, so now you touch upon monopoly is right and I'm not going to say any personal opinion on that one if I can help it. So fair competition. Do you see fair competition in the Nordic markets when you look at how the monopolies turned into sort of like still keeping part of their business a monopoly but also entering into a more liberalized part of the market? Are they acting fair and are they being treated fair by the regulator or more?
I think the regulator and the state of course who is behind the regulator has arranged it in a way so that they can keep a fair part of the gaming industry for themselves being the lotteries, but there is no real protection reason for keeping the monopolies for lotteries and things like that because they don't show much of a gambling problem. So I think it's more for financial reasons and I think to answer the question, the competition is not really fair.
Right. Right. So you also said that it takes a lot of cooperation between all the stakeholders in the ecosystem to really make it happen in a good way. Yeah.
It's a balance how to strike the right balance. And so obviously by saying that one you also acknowledge your responsibility as a big operator, right.
Yeah.
We tried to communicate with the regulators and unfortunately I guess Finland regulator is not here today which is a little bit weird that when they are very close to releasing regulations and they are working on it as we speak. I know that why don't they go here to learn? I mean it's not that far from Helsinki to here.
Right, and a piece of advice for Finland. I mean obviously we all of us in the room have a lot of experience. I can see very many experienced faces here. But at the same time it's easy to provide advice right when you're not in the very middle of it. So it's not always that regulators can share the reason behind a given legislation and a given way of regulating. But a piece of advice to fill in, what would that be?
Piece of advice would be to as we said here channelization that is actually the measurement of success. So if you want to have a high channelization and I think you need to have a high channelization to have a sustainable gaming market, then you need to have the things in order: you need to have a decent tax level, you need to have a full-fledged product, and you need to have the possibility for the licensed operators to communicate to the market with restrictions of course, but there needs to be some way of doing marketing.
So, Pontus, is it really hard work to have a dialogue with regulators in the Nordics? Is it hard?
