Who Owns Online Casinos?

[Garf79]

Have you ever noticed that when you check your bank statement and see the deposits and payments in from casinos the two don't match up? For example here in the UK I deposit to UniBet on my bank statement it shows up as Trannel International. It is not surprising that big online casinos have umbrella companies, people that run the books and of course have other business interests. So in this the first post in this series I am going to take a deeper look at who actually owns online casinos. It will not be easy to get to the bottom and find out who exactly owns them as they are usually subsidiaries. This means there will be a lot of holding companies and parent companies to sift through.

So lets start with UniBet, I have already said that UniBets parent company is Trannel International and they own and operate a number of other casinos.

Trannel own a number of other online casinos Maria Casino, Otto Kasino, Kolikkopelit Casino, UniBet and others. Trannel are part of the KindRed group who was founded by Anders Strom in 1997. They are a Swedish based company and are listed on the NasDaq Stockholm as Kind SBD. Their annual revenue in 2017 was around 750 Million!

This is just the start of this post I will look in to who Andres Strom is a little bit more and who the current CEO is of the group and more in the next post.

[Garf79]

Anders Strom:

 

Anders was born in 1970 making him 52, he founded the KindRed group, Mr Strom founded Unibet Group in 1997. It would become Kindred Group in 2016.

This is the man who gets all your money from the casinos in the post above.

In 2020 Anders Strom stepped down from running KindRed saying he wanted to focus on other areas of iGaming.

“Starting as its Founder and CEO, and working as a Business Development Director and, till today’s AGM, as the Executive Chairman of the Board, I am now closing a chapter in my endeavours”, he wrote.

He explained that, “after the founding of Unibet/Kindred, the next 10 years were devoted to leadership and business development in our companies, with Kambi as the most successful offspring”.

In truth it looks like Mr Strom got voted off of the board from the company he founded but he still owns a large share of it. He has recently bought almost a 20% share of KAMBI, which is a leading platform for B2B sports betting. Kambi Group Plc is a B2B provider of sports betting services to licensed B2C gaming operators. The company provides a software platform with front end user interface, odds compiling, customer intelligence and risk management. Kambi Group is listed on First North at Nasdaq Stockholm under the symbol "KAMBI" (SOURCE)