Ubisoft Entertainment SA will carve out a unit including Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Sixinto a subsidiary with an enterprise value of about €4 billion ($4.3 billion).
Tencent Holdings Ltd. will invest €1.16 billion to acquire a 25% stake in the new entity, which will have licenses for the intellectual property of the games in exchange for a royalty, the French video game company said in a statement on Thursday.
Ubisoft, which was founded by France’s Guillemot family, has been working to bring new investors into its video game properties, Bloomberg News has reported. The valuation of the new unit surpasses Ubisoft’s current enterprise value.
Ubisoft’s US-listed depositary receipts jumped as much as 12.5% on the news.
Ubisoft is largely run by one family, the Guillemots. What seems to be important to them, above and beyond everything else, is running a company called “Ubisoft”. Their company has a lot more value if someone else can run it, but they won’t budge on that, so their stock has tanked over the past number of years, as they keep making bad decisions. They tried to partner with Tencent to take Ubisoft private, which basically means buying out all of their investors, but Tencent also wanted the Guillemots gone, which wasn’t happening. So instead, they made this new company that Tencent can have more control over, which gets the best parts of Ubisoft’s portfolio as well as a lot of the debts, but Tencent has enough sway to flip off the Guillemots and make decisions they think are better. Meanwhile, the Guillemots still get to run a company called Ubisoft into the ground, but they get to start fresh with less (or zero?) debt, so they don’t have to dig themselves out of a hole first.
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I’m not well versed in finance. Is this good news for Ubisoft or bad news?
Ubisoft is largely run by one family, the Guillemots. What seems to be important to them, above and beyond everything else, is running a company called “Ubisoft”. Their company has a lot more value if someone else can run it, but they won’t budge on that, so their stock has tanked over the past number of years, as they keep making bad decisions. They tried to partner with Tencent to take Ubisoft private, which basically means buying out all of their investors, but Tencent also wanted the Guillemots gone, which wasn’t happening. So instead, they made this new company that Tencent can have more control over, which gets the best parts of Ubisoft’s portfolio as well as a lot of the debts, but Tencent has enough sway to flip off the Guillemots and make decisions they think are better. Meanwhile, the Guillemots still get to run a company called Ubisoft into the ground, but they get to start fresh with less (or zero?) debt, so they don’t have to dig themselves out of a hole first.
This could help. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta8z3-XmIhg