“We are exhibiting our table games and video games, but we are focusing on slots. We’ve got 93 slots on inventory, last year we developed 10 slots. We’ve produced 30 slots in the last 3 years. In 2015 we made a decision to market and expand, we started our planning then. We’ve attended our first ICE show in February 2016 and in three years we’ve grown exponentially in terms of our revenue. We have almost a hundred customers now and much in prospect as well,” said Botha.

“This is the 4th year in a row for the company exhibiting at ICE. The first time was quite an anxious time for us. We’ve succeeded in getting the stand in the very same position and we have continued here for the last four years, consistently.” he added.

When asked about the company, he said: “We have a strong management team and 20 nationalities are represented in the company. There are two things people love about us: they love our games, and they are looking forward to the next month to see what’s new. We are also quite well known for our client service, because we are a small company and we listen to our clients. With our clients we  integrate very quickly and our technical and client support side of the operation is superb.”

Botha then affirmed: “We began our focus on Europe at the beginning of last year and appointed a European Business Development Manager in 2017 and now we have five people that are based around various locations in Europe. Our games are certified across 16 different jurisdictions, such as Malta, UK, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Sweden, Denmark, the CIS area, Romania, Croatia. Obviously all of our latest 35 slot games are certified.

When asked about the goals of the company at ICE event, he answered: “Well, that has changed. In the beginning, we wanted to sell to potential operators and aggregators. Our goal has always been and continues to be to achieve exposure, get the brand name of Habanero out there, to be recognized. So now we’ve achieved some of the exposure we set ourselves out to achieve. We are also publishing and advertising in most of the major trade magazines.

Then he commented the plans of Habanero for the current year: “In 2019, we are aiming to do 11 games and we have 10 to go with Hot Hot Fruit already released, our showcase game this year. We’ll also be doing some culturally specific table games. As far as we are concerned, table games represent a significant portion of our business. In 2016, we were one of the first few suppliers to bring table games to HTML5, before even the move to convert slots from Flash to HTML5. We’ll bring out three more table games this year. Culturally specific really means not necessarily blackjack, roulette or poker, which we already have plenty of, but there will be interesting games that people of certain nationalities play. It has not been seen before.”

When consulted about the importance of ICE show, he said: “ICE is the biggest annual show in the world, and it is extremely important. This year I would say that what’s happened is that it looks more professional. If you take a picture of our stand, I would say it is probably our best stand to date, we are improving every year. We love our stand at ICE.”

Habanero will be exhibiting in other shows in 2019: Notably iBG Live, ENADA, and SIGMA in Malta, where we also exhibited in 2018. ENADA will be new for us.

With regards to Latin America, Habanero is certifying in Colombia. “I’m not sure how to deal with regulation aspects in Latin America, but we believe that the region has a good potential,” he stressed, and then added that the company is also certifying in Portugal and Spain.