And the Ubisoft logo
The French video game publisher Ubisoft announced on Wednesday lower results in the second quarter, marked by difficulties on certain highly anticipated games, compared to the same period in the previous financial year, but the group confirms that it is maintaining its financial objectives for 2024-2025.
Net bookings for the second quarter are down 36.3% at constant exchange rates compared to the same period in 2023-2024. They amount to 352.3 million euros.
The producer of Assassin's Creed and Rabbids video games published revenue down 36.1% at constant exchange rates year-on-year for its second quarter.
Ubisoft has indicated that it expects net bookings of around 380 million euros for the third quarter of 2024-2025. This amount represents a reduction over one year “of around 39%”, linked to the fact that Ubisoft has no releases planned for this quarter, said financial director Frédérick Duguet during a call with journalists on Wednesday.
“Despite recent difficulties, we are continuing the profound transformation of Ubisoft to regain the level of creativity and innovation that has built Ubisoft's success, while strengthening execution and predictability,” said the CEO. and co-founder of the group Yves Guillemot in a press release.
Since the start of the year, the Ubisoft title, which has been quite turbulent, has lost around 40% of its value.
At the end of September, the video game producer announced that it was lowering its financial objectives for 2024-2025. Ubisoft explained this revision as a “reflection of decisions made” for the new opus of its flagship game, “Assassin's Creed Shadows”, and “a weaker than expected launch” of Star Wars Outlaws. Highly anticipated, the latter was released at the end of August.
As for “Assassin's Creed Shadows”, Ubisoft has decided to postpone its release, initially scheduled for November, to February 2025.
Questioned by Reuters, financial director Frédérick Duguet affirmed that Ubisoft “had exchanged with [ses] major shareholders quickly after the profit warning”, and that they “understood” its strategy and action plan to “put the player and the community first”, as well as to “analyze the dynamics behind the polarized comments ” who targeted Ubisoft, in order to “protect its reputation”.
The financial director did not wish to specify Ubisoft's strategic prospects and reiterated that the group was “studying all its strategic options”. At the beginning of October, Ubisoft had already expressed this position and declared “to take note of recent press speculation” after the media Bloomberg had mentioned discussions on a potential takeover of the French publisher by the Chinese group Tencent, already a shareholder of Ubisoft .
Regarding the offensive led by a Slovak activist fund, AJ Investments, against Ubisoft since September, Frédérick Duguet declared “to regret that this investor never contacted Ubisoft” before making his positions public, and to be ” open to constructive criticism” from its shareholders.
(Writing by Florence Loève, edited by Kate Entringer)