Battered on the stock market, will the main French video game studio, Ubisoft, find the help of one of its main shareholders, the Chinese giant Tencent, which already owns 9.2%? This is what the Bloomberg agency suggests, which announced on Friday, October 4, that the Shenzhen group and the Guillemot family, founders of Ubisoft, are exploring several options, including a purchase and an exit of the group from the stock market. Contacted, Ubisoft declined to comment.
Ubisoft shares have plummeted this year (-40% since January despite a 30% rise on Friday following acquisition rumors) following the game’s disappointing launch. Star Wars Outlawswith only 1 million copies sold a month after its launch, according to the specialized press, far from the expected figures. Another hard blow, Ubisoft had to postpone the launch of one of its star titles, the new installment of its series. Assassin’s Creed
The operation, which has yet to be confirmed, would be framed in a context of consolidation of the sector, marked in particular by the purchase, in October 2023, of the Activision Blizzard studios by Microsoft for 69,000 million dollars (63,400 million euros ). , a record. After its collapse on the stock market, the French company seems to be a prey, although it has established itself as one of the main players in the sector, with creative studios spread around the world.
long fight
The group, which announced that it is working with Netflix to bring its successful game to the screen assassin’s creedhas a successful “back catalog”: games that continue to sell long after their release. And wait with your new episode ofassassin’s creed achieve the biggest hit in its history while the previous party had surpassed $1 billion in revenue in December 2021 in just over a year.
For Charles-Louis Planade, director of international operations at the brokerage firm TP ICAP Midcap, Ubisoft has a “essential asset” and does not exclude that Microsoft, Electronic Arts or Vivendi may join the ranks.
It is not the first time that the issue of the acquisition of the French video game giant has shaken the industry: Tencent entered the capital in 2018 after a long struggle between Vivendi, which wanted to gain power within the publisher, and Guillemot. siblings.
