Concern about Ubisoft: Investors get no answers to their questions

French games developer Ubisoft is teetering on the brink: Ubisoft has been unsettling fans and shareholders with bad news at regular intervals over the past few months. The next one followed on Thursday evening: the action game "Assassin's Creed Shadows" had to be postponed once again, from February to March. With the game's postponement, company boss Yves Guillemot announced another strategic update that left important questions unanswered.

Guillemot speaks of good progress in the internal restructuring announced in October. Decisive steps have already been taken to increase efficiency and boost sales. In addition, consultants have recently been appointed to develop "strategic and capitalistic options" in order to fully exploit the "value potential of our assets". The aim is to extract the greatest benefit for stakeholders.

In the call with investors, Guillemot spoke of several paths forward – but did not want to answer multiple skeptical questions about what these paths might look like. Guillemot and CFO Frederick Duguet were also evasive when asked whether Ubisoft was already working on a specific option or whether it was still exploring the market. "The aim of this process is to unlock the greatest potential from our assets for the benefit of our stakeholders," Duguet simply replied , according to games magazine IGN. "We can't say any more than that."

Deal with Tencent?

Since a report by Bloomberg, the Chinese tech group Tencent has been considered a possible takeover candidate for Ubisoft. A privatization is also conceivable, which Ubisoft could manage together with Tencent. Tencent owns 9.2 percent of Ubisoft shares as well as 49.9 percent of the holding company owned by the family of Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot.

However, a deal with Tencent would be complicated –, not least because the megacorporation was recently officially classified as a Chinese military company by the US Department of Defense. Although this is not currently accompanied by sanctions, it damages the company's reputation and is likely to attract considerable criticism from the press and investors if a deal is struck. Guillemot did not want to comment on whether Tencent's classification as a Chinese military company could affect potential takeover talks when asked by investors.

Ubisoft is in a precarious economic situation: several releases in recent years have failed to meet the French publisher's expectations. Ubisoft announced its first steps out of the crisis in the fall. Future Ubisoft games are to be made available to all players at the same time again. Guillemot also made it clear that the company does not want to support agendas in its games. Part of the realignment is also the return of Ubisoft games to Steam.

At management level, the "improvement of our production is to be accelerated", according to an internal letter. Guillemot also wants to improve communication.

(dahe)