Everybody is now talking about the state of the UK Category C market. If we are in part guilty of creating some of that talk then I make no apology. It is amazing what surfaces when a little old-fashioned investigative journalism comes into play.
A very respected friend of mine in the UK machine manufacturing business once described me as “capable but mischievous”. I took that as a compliment at the time, and still do.
At the risk of being yet more mischievous about the UK business – one close to my heart having spent 26 years as editor of Coinslot, even though it was in another era – there is still more to contemplate in this Category C mess.
Is it a mess? Just because it is changing, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t changing for the better. So the market shifts to a manufacturer-funded rental system. Is that so very bad? Let’s not be afraid of change. It isn’t exactly the Germanic hordes sweeping across the hallowed turf of our own little island patch, so much as welcome investment at a time when we apparently can’t invest for ourselves.
I would much rather welcome German/Austrian money than no money.
It is all background to the causes for the 2011 figures of only 12,000 new machines going into the UK market’s Category C sector. That is pitifully small, even if there were some rental/shared income machines also going into the business which are not shown by those figures.
Clearly, the retailers stopped demanding high injection rates – and probably used that to drive down rents on existing machines. The operators may not have worried too much about that as a trade-off to not having to reinvest. You might get away with that in the pub sector, where you have the problem of diminishing numbers, both of locations, footfall and income. But in the AGCs?
I can remember the arcades business suffered because of lack of enthusiasm for re-equipping and stretching the life of the old machines. That led to boring and uninspiring locations but the operators saved a bundle. Their problem then became one of getting the punters back once they did buy some new machines. With so many alternative attractions for the punters’ cash these days, they might never come back.
If that is a collection of mischievous comments, then so be it. I’ll make no apologies for saying what many thinking people came up with long before me.
