Another successful market entry! Five Merkur suns are shining in Andalusia!

ESPELKAMP/GRANADA. Having been “absent“ for almost three years, the GAUSELMANN group returns to Spain with five of its own gaming-locations simultaneously! Since 21th of June five well established gaming halls in Granada, Andalusia, are part of MERKUR CASINO. “The Spanish market offers us excellent opportunities to create unique synergy effects and to realize them successfully: on the one hand the presentation of our strong product pipeline consistently geared to the local market – which MERKUR GAMING has been successfully demonstrating in Spain for several years. And on the other hand the successful formula for localisedentertainment centers ‘made by Gauselmann’ that are ground-breaking trendsetters in this agile market segment!” says Rolf Klug, member of the board of Merkur and Spielothek International of Gauselmann AG. Managing director Rolf Falke adds: “The Spanish market is one market of the future, in which we firmly believe. Andalusia is autonomous and therefore offers our company with its decades of know-how as ‘Die Spielemacher’ excellent legal conditions for further promising investments.“

The five new locations, based in the Spanish city Granada with roughly 240,000 inhabitants close to the Sierra Nevada skiing area and famous for it’s “Alhambra”, will be remodeled and refurbished with a typical and localized ‘MERKUR CASINO’ interior design in the coming weeks. On average, the opening hours will be from 8.30 a.m. to 11.00 p.m. Approximately 30 gaming machines per location are planned.
The five new Spanish subsidiaries will be staffed with 20 employees. Thus, MERKUR CASINO employs all in all more than 530 staff in Europe (excl. Germany).

Not only well-trained staff that drives to offer excellent service, a consistent public-oriented product management and event-oriented ambiance, but also target-group oriented marketing, and the focus for innovation and creativity are decisive factors, on which MERKUR CASINO’s uniqueness in Europe is based.

Today, the GAUSELMANN group operates almost 250 „high-tech gaming locations“ in the European markets, more than 190 of them are Merkur-Spielothek arcades in Germany. In the fiscal year 2005 the family-managed company generated revenues of EUR 688.2m with a total business volume of EUR 1.004b. More than 5,600 employees worldwide work for the GAUSELMANN group, the only company in the German amusement machine industry to be certified according to ISO/DIN 9001:2000. The friendly and smiling Merkur sun has long become the lucky symbol and a guarantor for innovative leisure time culture even beyond western Europe’s borders.