Factory Closed?

[The Wealthy Pit boss]

Hello,
    An executive at the casino where I am employed has informed the staff that "one of the only two manufacturers in North America" has closed their factory either during the pandemic or since... without selling their business but simply shutting down. Apparently this has lead to many casinos transferring their orders to the other factory, leading to a backlog and shortages in pre-shuffle cards. I'm wondering if anyone here knows the name of the manufacturer that closed down?
I hope I asked this in the right place, I am new here and this is my first post.
Thanks.

[Don Boyer]

Hello,
    An executive at the casino where I am employed has informed the staff that "one of the only two manufacturers in North America" has closed their factory either during the pandemic or since... without selling their business but simply shutting down. Apparently this has lead to many casinos transferring their orders to the other factory, leading to a backlog and shortages in pre-shuffle cards. I'm wondering if anyone here knows the name of the manufacturer that closed down?
I hope I asked this in the right place, I am new here and this is my first post.
Thanks.

I personally know of only three manufacturers in the United States that are still active today.  (Sorry for the late answer.)

The biggest is the United States Playing Card Company (USPC), now a subsidiary of Cartamundi.

Next biggest is Gaming Partners International (GPI), which owns Gemaco (based in Missouri) and Paulson (based, I think, in Nevada, near Las Vegas), and a few others - all smaller companies which deal almost exclusively in manufacturing for casinos.

Smallest would be Liberty - they acquired some assets of some other small companies, but they're also pretty small themselves compared to the output of the other two companies.  I'd wager that their sister company, Gambler's Warehouse (formerly Gambler's General Store), does more business in terms of selling decks, mostly made by other companies, and handling order fulfillment for designers doing boutique projects, both privately-funded and crowdfunded.  I doubt they're who your boss is thinking of, as I don't think they do any casino work.

I know for a fact that USPC was closed for a while in the early days of the pandemic, and that the closing caused a backlog in orders - a backlog that was complicated by many factors involving screwed-up logistics chains worldwide and still exists today.  Compounding this issue is the fact that while anyone who reports to work stayed home, most graphic designers these days work from home and suddenly had time to kill - and kill it they did, making new deck designs and offering them on Kickstarter to people with time on their hands, a hankering for interesting-looking playing cards and extra money in their bank accounts.  This simply made the issue into more of a bottleneck.  Not all these projects were printed in the US, but a healthy percentage of them went to USPC to do the work.  The only "boutique" printers I know of doing this kind of work are located in Taiwan, mainland China, India and Ukraine, though the latter may no longer exist, what with the war and all.

It would not surprise me in the least to learn that GPI's printers were also shut down for a period of time during the pandemic and are suffering the same logistics and supply issues today.  USPC orders that used to take 6-8 weeks are taking months, I've been told - at least double the normal time.  While I have less current information now, it's probably still true to this day.

Everyone's feeling the pain on this one - companies of all sorts are still having supply chain snafus all up and down the line and products that used to be easy to obtain are at times difficult to impossible to find.  Last estimate I heard was that, on a global scale, the logistics issues companies are running into now won't be completely squared away until perhaps some time in 2025.

[The Wealthy Pit boss]

Thank you for the information. I still don't know if my employer got the story wrong or not... I was suspecting that the cards that were no longer available were Gemaco, but I haven't seen anything yet to indicate that to be true. Anyway, after reading your response, I am more knowledgeable than I was. Thanks again.

[Don Boyer]

Thank you for the information. I still don't know if my employer got the story wrong or not... I was suspecting that the cards that were no longer available were Gemaco, but I haven't seen anything yet to indicate that to be true. Anyway, after reading your response, I am more knowledgeable than I was. Thanks again.

Actually, I did a little more research.

GPI, I hadn't heard much about them since they bought Gemaco - USPC had purchased Gemaco first, but was forced to sell it off to prevent anti-trust proceedings.  I just learned that GPI was itself purchased by Angel Group in May of 2019, based out of Kyoto, Japan.  Angel's long been a quality maker of playing cards for retail and casino buyers - I own a few of their decks and I like the quality.

Turns out that at some point before the purchase, GPI set up the company's North American headquarters in Las Vegas, but started manufacturing of the cards in a factory in Sonora, on the Mexico side of the US border.  I'm not sure at what point or under whose ownership that the US printing operations were shuttered, but they are indeed shuttered, it seems.  They're no longer considered a domestic manufacturer.

So if your casino is dedicated to buying from US manufacturers, USPC is the only game in town left, at least for casino-grade decks.  When the operation was sold to Cartamundi at the end of 2019, Cartamundi kept all of the US operations intact - both USPC's and their own.  In addition to playing cards made in Erlanger, Kentucky, Cartamundi has a board game factory outside of Boston and a customizable card game printer in the Dallas area - last I heard, they're the ones printing all the Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon cards, maybe Yu-Gi-Oh! as well.  USPC's print operations aren't expected to move anytime soon - they only opened their current plant in 2009 and it's still pretty close to state-of-the-art.  I doubt Cartamundi has any future plans to move their operations - nor their operations in Vitoria, Spain, where USPC subsidiary Heraclio Fournier operates a card printing plant.

As far as Liberty goes, well - they state they do casino-quality cards on their site, but they do far, far more work in the novelty, advertising and gift market; things like custom decks for wedding gifts to guests, that sort of stuff.  I'm not the guy who knows all casinos, but to my admittedly-limited knowledge, there aren't any casinos supplied by them with playing cards.  I would think if there were, they'd go through the trouble of advertising about it on their web site - and there's not a casino card to be seen.  They do a decent job of making custom tuck boxes for some boutique decks, the kind of stuff you find on Kickstarter.

So od. ds are, your casino manager might have been referring to "Gemaco" shutting down their US operations, or they might have been talking about how USPC closed their factory during the pandemic itself, then reopened to a massive backlog of orders and a a supply chain that's tied in knots.  No matter how you slice it, there's a shortage of casino-grade cards, especially ones that are pre-shuffled, and it still hasn't squared itself away yet.

[The Wealthy Pit boss]

I think Gemaco shutting down the US operations is the likely answer. Thanks for the extra time and effort. It is very much appreciated.