Article Excerpt:
TWST: What is Shuffle Master?Mr. Yoseloff: Shuffle Master was founded in 1982 and went public in 1991, and as the name implies, the company was founded on automatic card shufflers. In the early 1990s, the automatic card shuffler was, of course, an unknown device in the casinos, and it took quite some time for it to achieve any level of acceptance. It took four years to reach 500 units. To put that in perspective, we place in excess of 500 units a quarter at this point. In any case, in 1993 the company introduced Let It Ride, our first proprietary or royalty earning table game, and our two major business segments were born; namely, proprietary table games and Utility Products, including automatic card shufflers. Later in the 1990s, for a time we were involved in the slot machine business, and in 2003 sold our slot machine division to another company in the industry, IGT, the leader in slot machines. We then refocused entirely on our core business of Utility Products and proprietary table games. At that time, we divided the company into the Utility Products segment, which includes automatic card shufflers and other products that provide security, productivity or operating savings to our customers, and the Entertainment Products segment, which begins with our live proprietary table games and has been augmented by some electronic versions of these. Finally, to complete the history, earlier this year we announced the formation of a new subsidiary, Shuffle Up Productions, which is very important to us because it will allow us to now take our intellectual property and broaden its use to things like national tournaments for our games and other leveraging of our intellectual property. The first event, the Three Card Poker National Championship, is actually already under way this year, and will be the subject of a televised series in 2006.
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