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Forums - Gaming - Report: Vivendi still looking to sale Activision Blizzard; Sony not interested, Microsoft haggling price

happydolphin on 07 September 2012
kumagawa said:
happydolphin said:
I love mention of Sony and Microsoft, as if they're the only ones able to buy them...

Not just Nintendo, but many other companies out there could buy them (Google, Apple, ubisoft, who knows). It's just weird the fanboyism in this industry's journalism.

 

Ubisoft is worth less than  $1 billion total, while Nintendo has only $5 billion cash in the bank (with Nintendo having lost money for the last 5 consecutive quarters their not going to want to get into the amount of debt necessary to buy a 60 % stake in Activision).  Sony on the other hand has $8 billion in the bank while Microsoft has even more.  The simple fact is Activiosion Blizzard has the 3rd highest market cap of any direct gaming company with only Microsoft and Nintendo higher but of all existing companies in gaming only Sony or Microsoft can afford Vivendi's 60% of Activision.

Yes there are companies with the money out there but why would they want it?

I don't know, you tell me.



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Kynes on 08 September 2012
mjk45 said:
Kynes said:
man-bear-pig said:

I just realised that for ~$1bn more Microsoft could actually buy all the shares in Sony...wow.


When you want to takeover a company, you need to offer a higher price than the actual market value, sometimes as high as 5 or 6 times the market cap if there is a bidding war.

That is usually true when someone wants control and makes a offer  , in this case the majority owner is shopping it and has debt concerns of it's own and there isn't much interest  .so the party with the negotiating strength here is the potential buyer.

My comment was about MBP one of MS buying SONY, I know that this don't apply to the ActiBlizzard sale.



PullusPardus on 08 September 2012

Maybe i'll get one Activision for myself, I've been buying lots of companies myself, So whatever.
Give me one with some fruit salad please, and no ice on the coke.



Kasz216 on 08 September 2012
happydolphin said:
Mr Khan said:

In this case i (for once) don't think it's fanboyism. It could well be that those are the only buyers Vivendi is courting.

Really, now is not the time to buy Activision. Activision really reached their apex about two years ago (or more. Peak year is somewhere between 08 and '10). At this point, CoD is likely not going to see growth as explosive as before given the movement to the new generation reducing userbase and general saturation and series fatigue, and WoW's decline is only going to increase. Given that Activision has basically poisoned the well on everything else, they are not well-positioned to increase value. StarCraft and Diablo are important, but not so incredibly valuable as to replace the monetary power of WoW

Vivendi is probably screwed on the matter of their debt, and they're just going to have to hold on to A-B.

Those are good points, but it would be a strange coincidence that Vivendi is only courting Sony and Microsoft, since there are other very big players in the industry (like they themselves are). I would tend to think it's fanboyism only focusing on two prospective buyers, but I'll admit that you could possibly be right. However I have a hard time believing it.

Though it's true that the bid is extremely expensive, there are other potential buyers for certain.


All the other buyers in the industry are mostly smaller then they are...

It's not really Nintendo's game.

At best maybe Apple would buy it to agressivly increase it's games offerings by causing mac ports.  Even that is extremely unlikely though since they're currently focused on creating their own streaming music plan.