“Unicum” converted its operations
It was Boris Belotserkovsky, the owner of the company and a co-owner of Ritzio Entertainment Groupm, who told the RBC Daily that “Unicum” Group had sold its last gaming assets. According to him, in summer they completed a deal selling 100% of Austrian company SiP (System in Progress), a developer of slot hall and casino operation system, to American company WMS Gaming, a global leader in gaming equipment sales. The deal accounted for $4.5 million. WMS Gaming Vice President and International Projects Managing Director Sebastian Selet confirmed the deal commenting that his company had been long cooperating with “Unicum”, the latter having been a distributor of WMS Gaming in Russia for five years. Mr Belotserkovsky emphasizes that now “Unicum” is entirely leaving gaming for vending business: “We sold the companies that we could not convert to our new business”. He said that “Unicum” had recently sold 1.5 thousand slot machines of “Slot Leasing”, another part of “Unicum”. They were purchased for $7.2 million by a “large Russian operator”.
The estimation by Alexey Philippov, head of information and payment systems department in “Shtrikh-M” (a major manufacturer of payment terminals) states that the volume of payment terminal production market was about $220 million last year. The growth of the qualitative characteristics for the first half of the year was 64% as compared to the previous year, of profits – about 40%.
the RBC Daily materials