Cards on the table with Cartamundi

In addition to a strong board of directors and rock-solid management, Cartamundi has another important asset: its employees.

Frederic de Somer: “Absolutely! Cartamundi started in 1970 with 0 employees. Today we are 3,000 ‘Cartamundians’ worldwide, all with entrepreneurship in their genes. We are a company that gives everyone opportunities, and that makes the difference: not only for top management, but also for middle management and employees on the shop floor.

To foster continued team engagement and spirit, we rolled out a ‘One Group, One Team’ programme through the executive committee. Our current CEO, Stefaan Merckx, too has directed and given further shape to this programme right from day one of his appointment. The aim is for all divisions and countries around the world to come together as ‘One Group, One Team’ and share that buzz.”

Cartamundi is in full transition with the digitalisation of the game world. It has also seized a number of opportunities during the pandemic, despite the many limitations. Can you explain this a bit?

Frederic de Somer: “Corona is not the first crisis we’ve been through. We’ve had other difficult years in our history, where we’ve had to pull out all the stops to get back on top. We owe this success to our 50/50 governance model, combined with a strong top management team and the strength and perseverance of all our employees. In this way we’ve been able to overcome each crisis pretty quickly. This also applies to the recent pandemic, where, for example, we were able to switch quickly to producing high-quality mouth masks via Medimundi, a consortium in which we have operational leadership. We felt we owed it to society to do our bit for public health. 

Even during the pandemic, we found that our physical game products continued to perform well, despite the rise of digital. In fact, demand has increased. This indicates that people need to be together and play together: ‘Sharing the Magic of Playing Together’, to say it in the words of our purpose. Moreover, forecasts show that while games are on the rise, physical games too continue to grow in popularity.” 

To return for a moment to the ‘best of both worlds’ combination of ‘traditional + digital’ at Cartamundi: why are you surfing the digital wave, and what are your ambitions in that market?

Stefaan Merckx: “Our vision is that consumers are continuously stimulated by a wide range of entertainment solutions. As stated earlier, our focus is on our purpose ‘Sharing the magic of playing together’, with an emphasis on togetherness. During the pandemic, we found that people have a need for ‘social bonding’, and that they want to experience this through traditional but also through digital games. Wanting to share positive emotions with one another is inherent in human nature. Emotions are therefore the common thread in our story. Even during the pandemic, we found that digital had not gained the upper hand over physical: indeed, the demand for physical games, just like that for digital games, increased enormously during the entire health crisis. But what we think is especially important, is to offer a unique brand experience. We are currently conducting tests for this in America. We offer digital versions of physical games, such as Hearts or Rummy, and we interweave the physical and digital brand experience, for example via QR codes on the playing cards that link to a unique version of the online playing card. The consumer no longer notices the difference because it becomes one and the same brand experience, so to speak. In addition to digital versions of playing cards, we launched a second platform around ‘fan engagement’, Hro, pronounced “hir-(ˌ)ō”). Hro is a new platform that includes digital and physical card distribution, combining blockchain technology and in-store presence. With this platform, we are moving to other entertainment brands and are looking for examples of Hro’s in the world of e-sports, regular sports, the film industry, comics, etc. We are partnering worldwide with companies such as Warner Bros. to develop unique digital NFT¹-experiences (fantasy games or apps) and also to live those experiences in the physical world. This is a unique asset at Cartamundi: the world of board games and card games is becoming a sub-segment of the broader entertainment world, in which we have found a niche based on gamification. And we want to focus even more on that in the future.”