Betsson, owned by BML Group, listed on Stockholm’s Nordic OMX Stock Exchange, is a company specialised in online gambling with over fifty years in business. The company has over one thousand employees and operates a successful range of online gaming and gambling products. Betsson’s main product offerings are its Sportsbook business, Casino, Poker Room, Bingo and Scratch Cards.
Originally a Swedish company, Betsson built its reputation on the Scandinavian market before expanding internationally and our head office is currently located in Malta. Betsson started life as long ago as 1963 when Rolf Lundstrom and Bill Lindwall opened a modest casino in Gothenburg’s Elegant Palace Hotel. The casino did well and the partners expanded into new locations in southern and central Sweden before joining forces with another young up-and-coming Swedish casino company and merging to form ‘Cherry’. Cherry went on to dominate the Swedish slots market in the 1970s as well as securing the position of Atari’s exclusive distributor in the UK and Scandinavian regions.
In the 1980s Cherry had success by expanding operations in Eastern Europe and was involved in joint ventures in the former-Yugoslavia with the national lottery structures as well as securing the very first casino license to be issued by Poland in 1989.
The 1990s saw the advent of the internet and Cherry was one of the first companies to spot the potential of the new technology, investing in Net Entertainment, a company developing the first online casino software. Cherrycasino.com also opened towards the end of the millennial year and technical work on Betsson.com started.
In the early Noughties, Betsson obtains a casino license, starts operations in a number of different countries and develops different products such as sportsbetting and its poker room and takes over the group’s other early online casinos such as CherryCasino.com.
In the intervening period Betsson has become one of the major online gambling companies in Europe and South America and is now heavily involved in developing the Asian market. The company has been recognised for its ethical approach to the industry and was crowned the Socially Responsible Operator of the Year in 2009.