Stand S7-130 at the ICE Totally Gaming show in London in February will demonstrate that four will go into one – the four in this instance being a quartet of the supply industry’s best names in a niche sector of high expertise.
Martin Spies and his Signs4U from the Netherlands will co-habit the stand with compatriots REAC of Rotterdam, the debit cards and management systems specialists, and another Dutch element in Erik de Kat with the high-technology Hess money handling equipment from Germany. And the fourth member in this unique quartet will be Paul Steelman and Partners, the industry’s best-known names in casino design.
For Martin Spies, this year is the 10th anniversary of his company’s participation in the London show and he is pleased to have secured a central position on the exhibition floor. “I am also delighted to share it with three companies with whom I have an excellent and co-operative working relationship, both personally and in terms of our respective businesses. Those businesses all dovetail together naturally; encompassing money handling, cashless systems, signage and design. They are all complimentary to one-another.”
His own company has had one of its best years, with its range of physical signs and digital signage, including the installation of hundreds of signs in Italy with the leading concessionaires to the Italian market, such as Lottomatica and Sisal.
But the company has won contracts all over Europe during the year and in its home country, the Netherlands, Signs4U has, with its distributor REAC, won contracts with all of the major operators - JVH Gaming, Janshen-Hahnraths, Play World, Merkur Casinos, Carousel Arcades, Hommerson Casinos and Recreatieprojecten Zeeland - for its YCD/CNario products.
The description of Hess as a premier company in its sphere is not unreasonable when it is considered that the bulk of its business is with the banking industry, which demands – and gets – only the best. But for the gaming industry, Hess has its Scorpion 410 and 411 models, both of which are familiar on the casino floor and capable of handling virtually any process concerning bills, coins, TITO and cards, and now has an option to work with the new REAC system which has gone into the Dutch arcades.
REAC’s card system is newly-developed for a Dutch market which has just changed to permit cashless gaming for the first time, either with TITO or cards. In REAC’s case it was already supplying a management system for 90 per cent of the Netherlands' casino-standard arcades, so it was a moderate step but one with a high degree of technical expertise to translate that into a very effective card system. That system has just undergone extensive trials in the Netherlands and is now being rolled out across a number of locations. It is the ability of that system to ‘travel’ into other jurisdictions which takes REAC to London.
Steelman Partners Europe is the fourth Dutch-based company, with its headquarters in Amsterdam. It recently celebrated the grand opening of its Zurich casino project in Switzerland. The company is one of the world’s leading entertainment architecture companies specialising in interior design, graphics, branding, planning, theatre design, 3D design and lighting. It also has offices in Zhuhai, Macau and Ho Chi Minh City. It has a client list which reads like a Who’s Who of gaming: Venetian/Sands, MGM, Harrah’s, Swiss Casinos, Sheraton, Holland Casinos, and many others.
