CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero spoke to GG World Lottery CEO Mark Hutchinson on his many years of experience in the industry, as well as his company’s plans for expansion.
Mark Hutchinson, CEO of GG World Lottery, has been in the lottery business for over three decades and has helped maximize the market’s potential in numerous places. “The lottery industry in the United States is relatively new. According to word of mouth, the industry is twice as big as the film industry in the U.S. It’s worth about $70 billion a year, just in the United States. I jumped into the lottery business back in 1983, so I’m an old timer in the lottery business. I think there were seven states running. I jumped in in Colorado,” he said.
His prior experience wasn’t directly related to gaming. “My background was in Pepsi Cola, and the Colorado Pepsi franchise was notoriously the best franchise in the world, because of their sales and marketing system. I was brought into the lottery business by the real godfather of the U.S. lottery business, his name is Owen Hickey, to recreate the sales and distribution model in the state of Colorado, which I did, and it worked really well,” Hutchinson said.
His success hasn’t been limited to the U.S. either. According to Hutchinson, “The oldest lotteries in the world are in the continent of Africa. I went to London in ’89, and launched an operation in London, scratch-card operation lotteries, that’s now arguably the biggest, most successfully-run lottery in the world in London, went down to South Africa from there because of the colonial history, started a lottery in Africa that is also one of the most successful in the world now.”
Hutchinson noted that in Africa, his work wasn’t just a commercial operation, but one for infrastructure building. “We’re commercial. My goal is to sell as many tickets as possible, but the more tickets I sell, a percentage goes to a good cause. It’s a great market. The technology operations, for example, in South Africa. In the mid-’90s they launched the world’s most state-of-the-art GSM wireless network, so now we can use wireless technology, we can use internet technology. We could launch across those markets, we’re all GSM-standard, without the constraints of terminals, and [with] the financial capability with cryptocurrencies,” he said, which makes GG World Lottery’s games, running on the Ethereum blockchain, fitting.
Hutchinson said, “Everything’s ready now. So we’re starting, at GG, we’re starting on the continent of Africa, we’re starting in South America. We’re going to end up global. It’s kind of like Powerball growing to what it’s grown to. We’re going to do the same thing around the world with GG gaming, because you can do it now.”
