Vivendi Slowly Buying Out Ubisoft Without Consent

Anyone recognize the name Vivendi? Probably not, but they use to own Activision Blizzard before Activision Blizzard decided to escape them and bought themselves... yes they literally bought themselves out from Vivendi. Well now Vivendi wants back into the video game industry. They started by buying Gameloft, the huge mobile publisher and developer known for games like Modern Combat and Asphalt. This wasn't a friendly purchase either, they took them by force using french laws and buying up stock to become the majority owner.

Now they seem to be doing the same thing with Ubisoft. They've been slowly buying up stock and are now at 30% ownership. Vivendi insists they are simply investing in them due to favorable market prices and just want a seat on the board, but here's where it gets interesting. Gameloft and Ubisoft were founded by the same people, en fact it's a family of people the Guillemot's. However both existed as separate companies. The Guillemot's truly believe this is a hostile takeover and have pretty much alluded too saying they gave up on fighting for Gameloft to focus all attention on protecting Ubisoft.

It's unlikely they'd be able to take over Ubisoft completely without consent of it's current owners (for a number of reasons) but they are clearly edging their way to a place of power within Ubisoft. It will be interesting to see how they turns out. Ubisoft has a number of options, they could fight them with laws or possibly even seek out a merger with a more favorable company to put them out of reach. Ubisoft has said it's number one goal is to remain independent.

You can read more about it here

 

So far Ubisoft has remained independent. Last update I seen around 3 months ago Vivendi was up to 25%. So it seems they are still slowly trying to gather shares.

 

I think Vivendi misses Activision Blizzard printing them money, doing it themselves is hard so they are trying to get a new dev.

 

New report says Vivendi is stepping up efforts and aiming to have Ubisoft under its control by the end of the year.