Craig Morgan has been appointed managing director of Regal Gaming and Leisure, the major Gauselmann Group-owned operating company based at Bamber Bridge, Preston, UK.
Morgan has considerable experience of the industry, notably with the retail sector - the pub owners - at Greene King, a period of consultancy work in the industry and at Nobles, the major arcades group, where he was operations director for its resorts business.
He replaces Mark White at the head of an organisation considerably reshaped following Gauselmann’s acquisition in 2015 of what was previously named Sceptre Leisure.
Morgan has a keen awareness of the current situation in Britain’s AWP business (Category C machines). “It is a huge challenge,” he said. “The operating industry in the UK has not had the kind of returns it should have, considering the level of investment necessary today. This is historical; everyone went for density and that was a somewhat naïve attitude by senior people in the business many years ago. The operating industry generally only recently moved away from that approach.”
Morgan has inherited a company considerably streamlined by the application of some surgery and reshaping by a team brought in by its German owners. Regal bucks the current trends in the British industry for withdrawing from analogue machines only reluctantly, with over 80 per cent of the UK business still utilising that technology. Instead, Regal has over one-third of its current installed AWP base of 11,000 Category C machines in the digital format pioneered by the German owners.
“The retailers understand,” said Morgan, “that digital format is inevitable and that the 50,000 machines currently in British pubs will only slowly move away from analogue, but that is because of the considerable investment the operators have in the equipment currently on site.”
The market, he said, is changing and that change is accelerating, but the deal structure between the operators and the retailers had not changed. That, he said, was a factor that needed attention. “The pubcos have a challenging time right now, with reducing footfall, high taxation on alcohol, minimum wage levels and many other factors. We have to work hard to ensure that they continue to recognise the true value of their AWP installations.”
