Ubisoft’s speculative appeal has been making a comeback on the stock market since Friday. In the two days since the Bloomberg news agency reported that investment firms Blackstone and KKR were interested in the French video game publisher, its shares have rebounded 25%. They are now trading at just over 45 euros (+17%), which allows them to erase their losses since the start of the year, without however returning to their level at the end of January, when the consecutive acquisitions of Zynga by Take-Two and Activision Blizzard by Microsoft had propelled them to 52 euros; it was January 20.
Since then, and despite another consolidation operation in the sector (the Japanese Sony got its hands on Bungie), nothing was going well for Ubisoft on the stock market. On Friday, before speculation was revived, French shares were down 35% from their January peak, weighed down in turn by technical problems on Ubisoft Connect, the group’s online gaming platform, by the war in Ukraine (Ubisoft kyiv is one of the main French studios) or even by a cyberattack. Last year, the actions of the creator of the franchises “Assassin’s Creed”, “Far Cry” or “Tom Clancy” had already fallen by 45% due to the regulatory repression carried out by the Chinese authorities against a sector qualified as “electronic drug” and delays in game releases, a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic which slowed down the work of its teams.
According to Bloomberg, Blackstone and KKR funds ” have studied ” the case, but Ubisoft has not yet started “serious negotiations with potential buyers. » And, according to the renowned video game blog Kotaku, if it’s not a fund that’s buying it, it’s going to be someone else, since, citing current and past team sources, the he French publisher has had recourse several times in recent years to consulting companies to audit its activities so that it “get his accounts in order for a potential sale”relate the sources cited by the blog.
“Happy Days”
To its infinite independence, even Ubisoft, founded by the Guillemot brothers, no longer cares. And given the evolution of video games towards streaming, “tech” giants, such as Amazon, are now among the potential suitors. They are lured by the potential of the market. Generation Z, comprising those under 25, has made video games the number 1 entertainment, which promises “happy days” to the sector, we explained again recently within the firm Midcap Partners. The market is expected to grow by 8% per year by 2024, to reach 220 billion dollars.
For Neil Campling, analyst at Mirabaud Securities, “Ubisoft has seven franchises, each with multi-billion dollar potential. » According to him, consolidation in the sector is not over.