Two months after the rumors that the Guillemot family and Tencent were planning a buyout of Ubisoft, Reuters reports that the company’s shareholders are still discussing buyout terms. One of the key issues is that the Guillemot family wants to maintain control over Ubisoft following the buyout.
Chinese giant Tencent is already the second-largest shareholder. However, despite earlier rumors, Reuters says they haven’t decided yet whether to increase their stake and, therefore, join the buyout proposal. Tencent would like to exert greater control on board decisions (such as the distribution of cash flow) if it has to finance the deal, but the Guillemots haven’t agreed to that yet. At the same time, Tencent also seeks to prevent any takeover of the company from third parties. As such, their strategy is reportedly to wait and see if the Guillemot family will sign on the proposal.
An Ubisoft spokesperson has released the following statement to accompany Reuters’ article:
We remain committed to making decisions in the best interests of all of our stakeholders. In this context, as we have already indicated, the Company is also reviewing all its strategic options.
It sounds like the Guillemots will have to give up on their long-standing goal of keeping Ubisoft independent. As you may recall, it’s not the first time they had trouble with that, as Vivendi attempted a hostile takeover a few years ago. They were ultimately unsuccessful, and Ubisoft enjoyed a brief reprieve.
However, it would not last. First came the accusations of sexual misconduct, which brought their own issues for the company to face. More recently, even game launches were not as successful as planned due to commercially underwhelming games like Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Skull and Bones, XDefiant (which will shut down in a few months, as we learned yesterday), and Star Wars Outlaws. Ubisoft was even forced to delay Assassin’s Creed Shadows, losing millions of dollars to try and prevent the same fate from befalling its premiere franchise.
