For a majority of the year, Ubisoft has been fighting to a French multimedia company known as Vivendi from performing a hostile takeover. Vivendi has claimed that they are “hoping to build a fruitful cooperation with Ubisoft,” but everything they do says otherwise.
The multimedia company has been sneaking around offering more and more money for stocks in the company. Vivendi began at owning 10% of Ubisoft's shares, but they have slowly been taking more and more. In February they jumped to 15%, then to 20% in June. The multimedia company has jumped to owning upwards of 22.8% of Ubisoft, with 20% of the voting rights in their hands.
While Vivendi has been slowly creeping over Ubisoft, the cofounder and CEO of Ubisoft, Yves Guillemot, has been seeking investors to help keep Ubisoft from falling into the hands of Vivendi.
To keep Vivendi at bay, Ubisoft has signed a deal to buy 3.2% of its own stock back from a French investment bank, Bpifrance. The deal will cost them $137.5 million and will have Ubisoft back in control of 6,652,178 of its own shares. "We want to express our warm gratitude to Bpifrance for its support during all these years," said Yves Guillemot.
Later this week, Ubisoft will be meeting to distribute board seat – something that will likely result in some more battles between Vivendi and Ubisoft.
