This CEO chose a job because it sounded fun. Now he runs a $12b company
Light & Wonder CEO Matt Wilson was offered two graduate jobs. His father recommended he opt for the media company role but Wilson was already hooked on gaming.
Matt Wilson, chief executive of gaming group Light & Wonder, was 25 years old when he was given his best piece of career advice.
He had just told his boss, former Aristocrat CEO Jamie Odell, that he wanted his job.
As a teenager, Matt Wilson wanted to be a trial lawyer after watching A Time to Kill, a legal thriller starring Matthew McConaughey.
At the time, Wilson was based in Macau, leading the Asian sales group for Aristocrat, Australia’s largest gaming company, and was studying for an MBA, which had given him the thirst for making big strategic decisions.
Odell told his young charge to first formulate a career plan.
Actually, Odell said: “Maybe just cool your jets and have a plan,” recalls Wilson.
The message was to understand where he was headed, so Wilson could map out a way to get there.
Understand the destination
“If you understand the destination, you understand where you are today. Then you know what moves you need to make to get the ultimate outcome. It’s almost like putting [the destination] into the navigation system on your car,” Wilson says.
He followed the advice and moved through the ranks of Aristocrat. He jumped to Las Vegas-based Light & Wonder in early 2020 and was promoted to CEO in late 2022 at the age of 41. In a full turn of the circle, Odell is now his chairman. Toni Korsanos, another former Aristocrat executive and a director of Treasury Wine Estates, is the executive vice-chairman.
The Nasdaq-listed Light & Wonder is a $12 billion company and did a secondary listing on the ASX in May last year. About 17 per cent of the shares are traded locally, and the company scored a spot in the ASX 200 in September.
It is one of the three big gaming companies in the US, alongside IGT and ASX-listed Aristocrat, and claims a 25 per cent share of gaming machines sold each quarter to pubs, clubs and casinos.
Light & Wonder has a similar share of European sales but claims a 50 per cent share of quarterly sales in Asia, including a 26 per cent share of the Australian market, up from 7 per cent three years ago in the third quarter.
It has 350 employees in Australia and 6100 globally.
Like all things in your life, you have got to take a bit of a risk to get a reward.
— Matt Wilson, Light & Wonder
Wilson grew up in Sylvania, a waterside suburb in southern Sydney. As a teenager, he wanted to be a trial lawyer after watching A Time to Kill, a legal thriller starring Matthew McConaughey. But while at the University of Wollongong, he opted for commerce and marketing, not really knowing where his career would land.
It wasn’t long before the gaming world caught his eye.
Wilson’s weekend job was as a bartender at a Sydney pub, where he was taken with the bright lights of the gaming machines.
The young student loved the characters, animations, sounds and graphics.
“I was fascinated with the gambling side of that business. It was a big contributor to their profits.
“Part of [my] fascination with [the machines] was playing the product and understanding what made them work, and what made them different, the games that were popular and less popular,” Wilson says.
“I just think gambling is inherently a human interaction. I felt like there was a bit of risk/reward. [Like] all things in your life, you have got to take a bit of a risk to get a reward.
Toni Korsanos and Jamie Odell are former Aristocrat executives. Dominic Lorrimer
“It was the way the games played, the emotional reaction. I was fascinated by it from a young age,” Wilson says via Zoom from his adopted home of Las Vegas.
One day, the publican was heading to Aristocrat to consider buying some machines and suggested that Wilson tag along, given his obvious interest in the area. At the meeting, the young student learnt about Aristocrat’s graduate management program, and he went on to make a successful application.
This posed a problem, however, as he had also been offered a job in the marketing intern program at Fairfax Media, now part of Nine Entertainment, publisher of The Australian Financial Review.
Wilson’s father recommended that he take up the job with the media company, but the advice fell on deaf ears.
“This business is about building games. I thought, ‘what a fun place to work’,” he says. And gambling was not a new concept. Wilson’s father owned horses, a family friend trained racehorses, and he recalled his grandmother, “a great lady”, going to the local club and spending $50 on playing games.
Wilson says having an “inherent curiosity” about your company’s product is a precursor for success as a leader.
His vision for Light & Wonder, having sold off a series of peripheral divisions, is for the US-based company to be the “leading” cross-platform games company globally.
Cross-platform refers to three platforms: physical gaming machines, the social casino business and the online gaming, or i-gaming, market.
In the social casino sector, games are converted to a mobile phone app and played using virtual currency rather than actual money. Players are required to be over the age of 18.
Light & Wonder is developing a game based on the hit Netflix show Squid Game. Netflix
Light & Wonder’s business model is to build new games and deploy them across all three channels. One example is a game Wilson’s team is building based on the streaming blockbuster Squid Game, due to be launched in April. Squid Game has been the most watched show ever on Netflix, and Light & Wonder is the first company to secure a gaming deal with the streaming company, Wilson says.
“Trying to find intellectual properties that reach a huge population base and bring them to life in a gambling format is quite a challenge, but Squid Game had a lot of gamification elements to it. So it naturally lent itself to building a game designed around the show,” he says.
Asian growth
In the September quarter, all three Light & Wonder platforms grew at about 20 per cent, although Wilson expects the online business to grow faster over time as more countries and US states legalise the activity. Igaming has been in Europe for about 15 years, but is allowed only in six states in the US and is still illegal in Australia.
“I would say, over time, we see the digital business growing faster because of the legalisation,” Wilson says.
Geographically, Macau and Singapore, which are finally recovering after the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Philippines, which is aiming to double gaming revenues over the space of three years, provide significant growth opportunities. Helpfully in Asia, the market is dominated by just two companies, says Wilson – Aristocrat and Light & Wonder.
Another tailwind he points to is the decision to raise research and development expenditure to about 10 per cent of revenue from 7 per cent before the pandemic, which he says is driving gains in market share.
The key challenge for the business is rising interest rates and the toll they take on discretionary spending, particularly among younger companies. Casino operators are also less likely to invest in new products.
Still, Rohan Gallagher, an analyst at investment bank Jarden, says Light & Wonder’s “aspirational” target made in 2022 of $US1.4 billion ($2.13 billion) of adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (AEBITDA) by 2025 appears “both real and achievable”. In 2022, Light & Wonder turned an AEBITDA of $US913 million.
How does Wilson view the issue of problem gambling? A survey by the Australian Institute of Family Studies published in March last year found that three-quarters of adults had gambled at least once in the past 12 months and 38 per cent had gambled at least weekly. Among those who gambled, 46 per cent were classified as being at some risk of gambling harm.
Need for proper regulation
Wilson says the industry needs to be properly regulated with the appropriate frameworks in place.
In Australia, which has been rocked by scandals at the country’s two biggest casino operators, Wilson is confident the regulators have “the appropriate powers to put in place what is appropriate for the long-term sustainability of the businesses and the protection of the consumers”.
And how does he respond to the suggestion that playing the pokies in the middle of the day might seem depressing, unhealthy even?
“I think it comes down to personal preference. I think people watch a lot of rubbish television and I wonder why would they waste their life watching Desperate Housewives, or whatever?
“Some people like to be inside and around activity and excitement. A lot of [casinos and gaming rooms] are like a third space, where people meet their friends and they have dinner, or lunch and drinks. I think there’s a social element.”
Wilson lives in Las Vegas, which he describes as a “very liveable city”, with his wife and three daughters, aged 11, nine and eight.
Apart from work purposes, he goes to the Strip with his wife about once a month to watch a show (no, he hasn’t seen Kylie Minogue’s performance) or for dinner and to “play some games”. Outside of work, Wilson is also training for a triathlon.
Is moving back to Australia, where he has not lived for 17 years, on the cards?
“We think maybe one day we’ll move back. My wife’s Australian so she does hold a candle to moving back to Australia one day. I say, ‘maybe one day’. But this is the place for us to be for the foreseeable future.”
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