Japanese gaming machine manufacturer Aruze Gaming is targeting sizeable growth in Europe in 2019 as it looks to shrug off past perceptions that its products were too attuned to the Asian market.

Coming off a year in which Aruze Europe enjoyed record revenue, the company’s Director of Business Development in Europe, David Meacher, told Inside Asian Gaming at ICE London on Thursday that customers were showing increasing interest in its newly developed product range – headed by the Muso Triple-27 cabinet released in 2018.

“People have often had a thing in their mind about Aruze but we’re seeing that people are quite surprised when they come and look at our product range,” Meacher said. “They have traditionally seen Aruze with the much bigger cabinets, very glittery, very, very bright cabinets. These are bright but more European and sleek in their design concepts compared to some of the older stuff we’ve done.”

Having been granted a license to operate and supply gaming machines in Cyprus in 2018 as well as approval to operate as a gaming related contractor in Greece, Meacher said the company was actively looking to increase its European footprint.

“Europe has always been a fairly small market for us but now we’re putting a lot of effort into it, we’re growing it and we’re seeing the performance figures coming back,” he explained. “As people see the performance and the word gets out there that our games are competing, that we’re not just that small niche market player we were in the past, it’s really going to build. Last year was a record year for Europe so we hope to build on that this year.”

Among the new games set to be released into the market is “Fu Lai Cai Lai” – a progressive link already proving popular in Southeast Asia that Aruze has high hopes will translate well to Europe.

“Our Asian-themed games are doing well,” Meacher said. “We’ve got some strong, high volatility Australian-themed games which generally work well in Europe so we’re bringing a lot of those games to the European market, but we will be bringing out more multi-game and European-specific games too.

“I expect in the second half of this year we should have some very focused European games in the market.”