Philip Doftvik: "While we invariably plan globally, we always act locally"

In this interview, Philip Doftvik outlines QTech Games’ strategy for dominating emerging markets through localization, long-term studio partnerships, and value-added services beyond aggregation. He highlights differentiation via packaged content, data-driven tools like QTech Labs, and the QT Play lobby. With strong momentum in Latin America and Africa, QTech is leveraging AI, hybrid retail-digital solutions, and deep market insights to drive sustainable growth and global leadership.

Q: QTech Games has been expanding its aggregated content portfolio at an impressive pace, particularly by partnering with innovative but lower-profile studios. What criteria do you use when deciding which companies make the cut and join the QTech Games ecosystem?

Uniqueness and high-quality games naturally represent key criteria, but for us at QTech, it’s also about local adaptation for specific markets. On top of that, we also want to work long-term with our partners, which means doing so much more than acting as just another sales funnel. In short, it’s always about the relationship with the studio, and the prospects for ongoing collaboration and innovation. So, the way we frame the partnership and its potential for future growth is vital.

Q: Beyond studio integrations, what other strategic moves have helped QTech Games stand out in 2025? Looking back, how effective has this approach been in driving growth and differentiation?

Differentiation is very important. Above all, that means being customer-centric – in both sales and account management but also in support and ongoing service to our clients and partners. We’re laser-focused on best practices in this regard. That could mean our simple invoicing structure and offset pricing.

Or the fact that we offer much more than just content - sought-after features include our campaign tools, and our QT Play game lobby, which means that operators don’t have to build their own casino lobby. Plus, it’s founded on years of data processing and machine learning, so no casino manager is needed either.

Or take our recently launched QTechLabs toolkit - a new network of data, analytics, and business-intelligence functionality which translates QTech’s platform data into real-time commercial impact and insights, for our partners. Importantly, all these add-on products are all included in our price, so we charge nothing as an extra cost for the added value we deliver.

Essentially, it’s all about building more value-added services besides our core business in aggregation. We also do aggregation differently compared to our peers since we sell content in packages which simplifies the process for our clients when adding new suppliers - no more contracts are needed if you have it addressed in your package.

Q: How have different geographies influenced your overall business strategy? In particular, has the rapid evolution of Latin America’s iGaming markets proven to be a significant growth driver for QTech Games?

Of course, by their very nature, emerging markets are highly fragmented and that’s an inescapable reality we’ve embraced. Speaking from a broader vantage point, time was when six or seven markets would be an attractive proposition for international presence for a global betting brand. Yet, in the current cycle, we’re witnessing the emergence of lots of national champions who are not globally-centralised operators.

It stands to reason. After all, almost every country has their own form of regulation, with variables oscillating around return to player, tax rates, marketing restrictions and market-access restrictions to name but a few. Which is why we’ve seen such a trend for global operators’ management teams partnering with local brands, working on the theory that it’s easier to support local leaders or the best platforms with the necessary local expertise. What invariably matters is knowing the customer, meeting them in their respective communication game (i.e. user interface familiarity, native language) with a host of localisation techniques. And at QTech Games, while we invariably plan globally, we always act locally, a fact which sets us apart from our rivals.

As for LatAm in particular, it’s been one of our target territories for the past couple of years and, like Africa, this continent is poised for seismic growth in the near future. Even if the introduction of regulation in Brazil has had its headwinds, the underlying reality on the ground is that it’s pulled back the curtain to introduce a huge population to legal online gaming. And it’s a tide that’s only rolling one way.

To this end, we envisage that Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Peru and others will generatehigh annual growth ratesfor the foreseeable future. There’s pent-up demand when you look at instructive metrics, like percentage of disposable income spent on gaming, which lag behind what we see nowadays in Europe, for example. Emerging markets like these can no longer be viewed as secondary. Indeed, they’re our primary objectives at this moment, and we have high hopes for what LatAm can deliver for QTech.

Q: QTech Games has also made notable inroads into Africa. What attracted you to this region, and what are the biggest challenges when it comes to remaining competitive across such diverse local markets?

Growth regions, or markets that have their respective futures ahead of them, are the enduring appeal, wherever we set our scene on the emerging-markets map. Couple that to young and tech-savvy populations that enjoy digital entertainment, and the ingredients for success are all there.

Those comments and criteria certainly track Africa’s young population and mobile-first economies, making this second most populous continent a potential powerhouse. At QTech Games, we’re already growing our African influence to make it a substantial part of the total revenue mix. We have high growth hopes for the region in the coming years, and we want to dominate and build a strong brand in the region.

Making it in this evolving ecosystem requires agile strategizing, coupled with tech innovation, and happily, these are two cornerstone philosophies of QTech Games, which have enabled us to grow our footprint from being the number-one aggregator for the Eastern emerging markets to becoming the leading game distributor for emerging markets worldwide. Our latest innovation on the tech front has been the launch of QTech Hybrid, which is now affording players in Africa a seamless switch from traditional retail to digital and back again.

QTech Hybrid is a software service that joins up QTech Games’ AI-powered casino lobby (a leading game-personalisation engine known as QTech Play) to a land-based (retail) management system and a state-of-the-art integrated AMS (Agent Management System) to manage both retail outlets and agents. This allows operators to scale their brick-and-mortar operation online. QTech Hybrid simplifies transactions by enabling deposits, withdrawals, and gameplay while allowing access to players both in-store and on personal devices.

As for challenges, the biggest one is to build the localization in terms of product, content, and team. However, after a couple of years of dedicated work and expert local hiring, I’m delighted to say that we now have a fantastic strategy and team in place, with boots on the ground that will make it all happen!

Q: Finally, looking ahead, what are your immediate priorities and key plans for QTech Games in 2026?

Overarchingly, our cornerstone philosophy is to continue to scale up QTech as the leading gaming aggregator for emerging markets. Making QTech a key player in Africa and LatAm will organically help us achieve that goal.

In high-growth regions like Africa and LatAm, content diversity matters enormously because player demand evolves very quickly — and it’s also shaped by local realities such as mobile usage, data costs, device types, and payment preferences. At QTech Games, we’ve always believed that sustainable growth — especially in emerging markets — comes from combining great content and deploying it in targeted packages, based on our product specialists knowing what works well in any given market.

In short, we’re always improving our platform's functionalities to optimise performance. And by gathering, observing, and refining raw data, we can identify and capitalise on emerging trends. Being an aggregator, we have a true advantage in data since we see data from both operators and suppliers across several markets.

Effective collaboration also involves understanding the relationships within the data and developing strategic plans to action and take advantage of those insights. Last year, we invested a lot in data and BI (the QTech Labs initiative we touched on earlier), and we will continue doing so in order to be even more data-driven than we are today. This development will progressively equip all our suppliers and operators with invaluable insights to secure lasting success. It’s an exciting time, but it’s also a long-term expansion play to which we’re fully committed.

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