The Kindred Group is exiting the North American gaming market as part of a broad effort to restructure the company and focus on its core, revenue-producing operations. It’s a move that includes at least 300 layoffs of North American-facing employees, but will save tens of millions of dollars over the long run.
Kindred’s departure from the North American continent was dropped at a recent call to investors and press release with the announcement, “As part of its strategic review, Kindred Group will exit the North American market with the expectations to have fully exited operations in the market by the end of Q2 2024, subject to the regulatory process.”
Though layoffs of this sort are extremely painful for the folks losing their jobs, the savings for their former employers are usually pretty substantial. In this case, the Kindred Group is expecting to save roughly $50 million (USD) within a year. The Kindred Group will also be implementing other, company-wide cost-cutting measures. Company officials are planning to use the savings to promote some of the hyper-local casino brands in their portfolio, as well as other efforts at brand extension.
Nils Andén, Interim CEO of Kindred Group summed up the North American exit saying, “The cost reduction actions announced today are both necessary and decisive. While it is never a desire to inform valued colleagues of redundancies, this puts us in a stronger position to secure long-term growth for Kindred across our locally regulated core markets. We can now focus our resources and tech capacity towards strategic initiatives and selected markets where we see clear potential to grow our market share.”
The Kindred Group was operating in North American under the Unibet brand in Unibet US brand in Canada as well as of Arizona, Indiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.