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JWeinCom on 22 September 2020
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animegaming said:
JWeinCom said:
Also lets remember, Microsoft has 300 billion or so in assets. Nintendo has 18.7 billion or so. Buying a company like Bethesda would mean spending nearly half the value of their company. That's a rather huge risk to take. They could like... maybe afford Capcom at best.

Yeah Nintendo while certainly not being strap for cash and making a ton of money, wouldn't be afford to what MS just did and at best it would of been merger of both companies similar to Bandai and Namco, Koei and Tecmo, or Squaresoft and Enix rather Nintendo buying Bethesda.

Hell Sony's market cap is pretty close to Nintendo's, so I am not even sure if they could have made a move like this either.

Well... Nintendo could. It's not like they'd go out of business if they it didn't work out, but taking that big of a gamble would probably make stockholders antsy, and if it didn't work out, there'd be major structural changes at the company. Whereas with Microsoft, they it probably won't even be the most significant thing in the company by a long shot. Sony on the other hand probably couldn't in any realistic sense.

Sony's market cap is I think something like 30 billion above Nintendo's... But that's largely based on predictions for the future.

Sony has a lot more assets than Nintendo does. Like... A LOT. But a lot of that is not in short term assets.

In terms of short term assets (cash or stuff that can become cash quickly), Nintendo has about 15 billion. Sony has about 54 billion.

But while Nintendo is basically debt free, Sony is not. They have about 46 billion in short term liabilities (debt that needs to be paid soonish). 

So... If Nintendo paid 7.5 billion for Bethesda, they'd still just be 7.5 billion dollars poorer. They'd still have enough money to do what they need to do. If Sony did the same, they'd be be left pretty strapped. They'd still be able to pay whatever they needed to in the near term, but they'd only have about 500,000,000 left to launch the PS5, fund development, pay life insurance, and whatever else they do as a company. They wouldn't have much of a cushion to fall back on if something went wrong, and they'd be in debt as a company if it didn't work out, which is generally not a good thing. Especially since Sony's been doing a good job digging themselves out of a hole recently, I don't think they'd do that.