Ville Toivonen
The policy made by Suomen Hippos on Friday contains great opportunities, but also great threats. At least the transition period is becoming very interesting, writes Ville Toivonen.
The central organization of track and field sports made a solution and decided to make a break from Veikkaus. Maisa Hyttinen / Finnish Hippos
On Friday, the central organization of trotting sports, Suomen Hippos, decided to move trotting games towards a license market system. Hippos does not decide the matter, but the position of the party involved certainly has a lot of weight.
Another option would have been to support the preservation of the exclusivity of trotting games in Veikkaus. So now Hippos ended up supporting a model where the supply of horse games in Finland would be opened up to competition.
The current gambling model will continue at least until the end of 2025, i.e. at least a couple of years. Hippos’ position on the promotion of the license model system was also conditional, i.e. it includes many marginal conditions that should be implemented in the new guidelines.
The list of Hippos’ wishes is so long that it is impossible to imagine that all of them will come true. In future negotiations However, Hippos has a lot at stake. From the point of view of the horse industry, it is absolutely central how, for example, government subsidies can be connected to Hippos’ plans.
Hippos’ idea is to establish a joint gaming company with a “Nordic gambling operator”. In practice, this means the gaming company ATG, which is 90 percent owned by the Swedish trotting center organization ST, which is the giant of organizing trotting games in Pohjola.
Veikkaus would definitely have liked to keep the trotting games under his control. The choice of Hippos is justified, although it also involves a lot of uncertainty and risks. However, Veikkaus’s outline of continuing close cooperation also contained a lot of promises that are not actually in Veikkaus’ own hands.
At least as interesting as what Hippos announced on Friday was what it tried to leave clear between the lines. Hippos’ press release only talks about establishing a joint venture with a Nordic operator.
Hippos undoubtedly wants to create an image of a company focused on horse games at this stage, although the idea is to compete in the gambling market more broadly.
– A mere horse betting company is not necessarily the best option in the license market, but the overall return is also sought more widely through other gaming verticals, Minna Mäenpää, CEO of Hippos, formulated Iltalehti when asked about it separately.
Finnished to Mäenpää statement also means offering other betting and casino games. ATG, which started purely as a horse betting company in Sweden, has also invested in casino games after the opening of the country’s gaming market, and the same idea is also behind the plans of Hippos.
In any case, Veikkaus will also run horse games in Finland for at least another couple of years. There are interesting times ahead, when Hippos changed with a one-time decision from a gaming company’s point of view from a partner to a future competitor.
You don’t have to be a great soothsayer to guess that Veikkaus’ interest in developing horseplay fell to zero. If Veikkaus is losing horse games, its interest is probably to try to keep at least its customers. The better Veikkaus can get horse players to switch to their other games, the better for it, and the more difficult for the company planned by Hippos and ATG.
One dimension in the matter is also the general visibility of trotting sports. Quite a significant part of the visibility of trotting sports is connected to Veikkaus in one way or another, from studio broadcasts published by Veikkaus to cooperation agreements with media houses. If Veikkaus turns off the money taps, the sport’s visibility will surely decrease.
However, all this does not mean that the horse industry has made the wrong decision. Although continuing with Veikkaus would probably have been a safer choice in the short term, in the long run, it is justified to assume that the earning logic of the industry is as strongly as possible in one’s own hands.
Continuing in a monopoly system would be prone to political fluctuations, when even a partially own game company creates an opportunity to develop operations in the long term. The central problem of the whole food industry has been that the financing model has been certain for such a short period of time going forward that investing in the industry has been very difficult.
During the modern Veikkaus, the funding of trotting sports has been in the form of various state grants. During years that have been challenging in many ways, the system has been quite good financially for the racing industry, but at the same time it has also been criticized as rigid and bad in terms of operational development.
If the future model outlined by Hippos on Friday becomes true, the industry is taking its future even more strongly into its own hands. Then there are few explanations.
The die is cast.