Guillemot Family and Tencent Reportedly Considering Buyout of Ubisoft - News

by William D'Angelo , posted on 01 December 2024 / 3,632 Views

Ubisoft's founding Guillemot family and Tencent are reportedly considering options for a potential buyout of the French video game company, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke with Bloomberg.

The Guillemot family and Tencent have been speaking with advisers to explore ways to stabilize Ubisoft and help bolster its value, which has lost over half of its market value this year. This is according to the people.

One of the possibilities would be to team up to take the company private. The last annual report revealed the Guillemot family owns about a 20.5 percent stake in Ubisoft, while Tencent owns 9.2 percent.

Some minority shareholders including AJ Investments have recently pushed for Ubisoft to take the company private or to sell the company to a strategic investor.

The people said the Guillemot family and Tencent are exploring other alternatives.

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.

13 Comments

Vengeance1138 (on 04 October 2024)

Buyout and then triple digit mass layoffs!

HopeMillsHorror Vengeance1138 (on 04 October 2024)

TBH... they need to...

Ubi employs almost 2x as many people as Activision with less than half the sales to back them up lol

VAMatt (on 06 October 2024)

I hope they're able to pull it off without Tencent becoming a majority shareholder. VG development is not a great fit for a public company. Its art, and it needs whatever time it needs. Public companies tend to focus on quarterly and annual performance, which puts pressure on them to push games out before they're ready. The problem with Tencent is that they are public. So, that problem will continue to exist. It isn't as bad when you're a small piece of a big pie like Tencent. But, being taken private with your controlling investors also being private would be ideal.

HopeMillsHorror (on 04 October 2024)

I own about .00002% of Ubisoft...

I'll sell it for a high price, Stranger

leftalone (on 05 October 2024)

People on twitter think that this new means Tencent is outright buying the company. That leads to a lot of misunderstanding. So It's not tencent acquiring ubisoft. What this news means is that the Guillemot brothers and Tencent might proceed to a MBO ( Management Buyout). It means they are going to buy a bigger part of UBI stocks. The goal is to prevent someone else to take control of the company. They actually did the same before to prevent VIvendi from taking control of UBI.

Pakuyasa (on 04 October 2024)

If they had waited until February they could have bought it much cheaper.

leftalone Pakuyasa (on 05 October 2024)

joke apart, It is highly likely that the Guillemots' and Tencent's decision to hint at a possible buyout right after hedge funds sold their Ubisoft shares up until the end of the fiscal quarter was a well-calculated strategic decision.