CHIEF executive officer (CEO) of Supreme Ventures Limited (SVL) subsidiary Prime Sports Ltd, Xesus Johnston, says the company is placing greater focus on its product, distribution and brand to effectively compete with the new lottery player Mahoe Gaming, which last week broke the gaming monopoly that SVL has held since 2001.

With just one week in with the competition, Johnston said the product adjustments, the most recent being the move to introduce $305 for every $10 winning on CashPot, has generated a lot of interest from players with the CashPot product.

“Our thought and vision has always been, regardless of competition, that we have to have the best product in the market, the best distribution in the market and we have to build the best brands in the market. Those three areas have always been the focus of the business and helps us to actually face the competitors and to perform well. Since the competitors launched, what we have done with our products has seen double-digit increases in sales. That’s positive and tells us we are doing the right thing for the customers who want a gaming or entertainment product in the market,” Johnston said.

He added: “If you think about distribution, traditionally it was only through retailers – brick and mortar. We’ve now added digital – online, where we now have our games online and you can purchase from SV Games with a debit or credit card. Plus, we’ve added another innovative sales channel called Super Sellers which is individuals who can walk on the streets with a wireless terminal and sell our gaming products by meeting customers in their neighbourhoods or high-traffic areas. Having a strong sales channel is important and being able to differentiate where you have traditional retailers and where you have mobile apps in the digital space where you can buy the products.”

Further, Johnston said SVL is still in a growth and innovation phase and will be looking to expand to 2,000 super sellers in the market.

“A lot of what we’re doing is about how we efficiently deliver to our customers the products and services that they need, and it requires building an extensive ecosystem that retail channels — both the fixed and online — are apart of , and that drives our business,” he said.

But, despite the realignment efforts, Johnston said a main challenge is complaints from buyers about channel conflict.

“On the downside we have got complaints and seen videos circulating on social media about channel conflict where people go into a location and they bought a product, thought it was a Supreme Ventures product and when they came to redeem it, they realised they had bought someone else’s product. That kind of channel conflict we’ve always thought would be real and now we’re seeing it play out in the market. That’s an area of concern for us and so we keep having to differentiate our product, promote to the customers and differentiate our brand,” Johnston said.

Meanwhile, Johnston also added his voice rubbishing claims of victimisation of retailers who enter contracts with the competition.

“We are not victimising anyone. We have been doing a channel and business realignment since 2019. Supreme Ventures was thought of as a very static organisation. Coming to the end of 2019, we acquired Post to Post (Betting). Post to Post was then the leading sports betting and off track betting operator in Jamaica and that was again part of our growth strategy to continue to build and expand our business. Going into 2020 we acquired the assets of Champion Gaming, which was at that point and still is one of the largest legal operators of Route VLT, which are the slot machines in the bars. So we had a Route VLT business, but we also moved to acquisition to allow us to grow,” Johnston said.

“Also in 2020, we launched our retailer loyalty programme where we had partnerships with Sagicor, KingAlarm, Guardsman and Flow where for our retail base, we have got them discounts on services coming from these providers. All of this is about how we pivot the business and realign. Specifically for retailers, besides the loyalty programme, we had a deliberate strategy which is still in play. Our business is what you call a full-service gaming provider. We have horse racing, we have Route VLT, we have lounges like Acropolis, JustBet Sports Betting and our numbers games like CashPot, Dollaz, Super Lotto, plus we do top up,” he said.

Instead of victimisation, Johnston said SVL has added three times more retailers in the last 40 days that those that were terminated in the last 12 months.

“What we started to do is to work with retailers so they could have more than one product in their location. Traditionally, they just had the numbers which were lottery products alone. That’s been a deliberate plan to give retailers as many products as they can accommodate, which then means that customers have a more convenient one stop place to buy products and services and to also increase retailer commission.”