E-sports and Web3 company Ampverse recently hosted the “Greatness is in Our Blood” public event to showcase its official competitive e-sports team Minana Esports, as well as introduce its roster of gaming personalities and entertainers here from the local scenes.
During his keynote speech, Ampverse founder and CEO Ferdinand Gutierrez shared the company’s roadmap for the Philippines in its journey of potentially becoming the go-to gaming and esports brand in the Philippines.
Ampverse’ approach to establishing brand identity will be to onboard the biggest gaming and esports celebrities and dominate the professional leagues with the Minana team.
“We believe in working with talents to build new businesses together. We’ve got a technology business that we’re looking at that will be able to give us that scale and we believe that this could be a very big part of us. Right now, we’re a very B2B-driven business, and in the future, we’ll be more and more D2C – which is direct-to-consumer,” Gutierrez said in an exclusive interview with Newsbytes.PH.
Gutierrez envisions a future where each of its gaming and esports personalities have their respective merchandise brands, expanding the business opportunities of Ampverse in the Philippines and fostering a stronger link among its brand ambassador partners.
“The B2B business side is really more about working with brands, connecting brands with the Gen Z and Gen Alpha. The thing that’s great about Ampverse is anything that we do, we own and operate. We own the data; we own every data point that goes with every single one of our teams and our creators,” he explained.
Since 2019, Ampverse is already present in five markets, owns seven pro-level esports teams including the newly formed Minana from the Philippines, is backed by a team of more than 100 strong, and a community size of more than 570 million that is driven by the large following of its strategically-choses brand ambassadors and rising esports athletes.
A study conducted by market research company Imarc shows that “pop-culturization” is driving the growth of the esports market which is expected to reach $3.86 billion in value by 2027, at a compound annual growth rate of 22.4% from 2022-2027.
“We’re a data-driven company, we understand where the opportunities in the regions are – whether it’s gaming or e-sports, there’s a lot of ways to get into each market. In markets like the US and Europe, they’re learning from us here in Southeast Asia,” Gutierrez claimed.
Ampverse plans to incorporate what it has accomplished with its esports team based in Thailand to its business model for Minana. Today, the Bacon Time team has its own official store and a blockchain-powered non-fungible token (NFT) series.
“At this point, we stick to gaming. But we also have, whenever we need to, we bring in entertainment. Obviously, entertainment is a big part of what we do. It’s always great to connect with fans. For us to win their hearts, getting them to meet people and touch and feel the brand is really important for us,” he admitted.
Ampverse and Minana’s mall show was graced by Eric “Eruption” Tai, ChooxTV, Hypebits, Lhea Bernardino, Elanorm, and King Jasro. During the event, Ampverse presented the official merchandise for Team Minana, as well as hosted activities and photo opportunities for the mallgoers.
“Ampverse is our newest brand, we’re very excited about it. We believe in the Philippines, and it is going to be a big part (of our expansion plans). I believe that this could be probably one of our biggest brands in Southeast Asia and perhaps it will be a global brand,” Gutierrez concluded.
