Video games provider Activision Blizzard, which has come under pressure from numerous scandals and unexpectedly weak figures, is being taken over by Microsoft – for almost $70 billion.
Microsoft Corporation is an international hardware and software developer and a technology company headquartered in Redmond, a city in the Seattle metropolitan area in the U.S. state of Washington.
Activision Blizzard is a computer and video game company based in Santa Monica, California, USA. The company was formed from the merger of publisher Activision with Vivendi Universal Games. In terms of sales, the company is the market leader in the computer and video games sector.
Microsoft is acquiring popular video game company Activision Blizzard in a nearly $70 billion deal. The software giant behind the Xbox game console thus secures popular games such as “Call of Duty”, “Overwatch” and “Candy Crush”. In this way, the Group intends to accelerate its growth in the games sector.
Activision Blizzard, for example, shocked its shareholders in early January with an unexpectedly weak outlook for revenue and profit in the fourth quarter of 2021. The shares of the video game supplier plummeted 14 percent. A slump that Microsoft apparently used to secure a majority stake in Activision.
So the group is offering $95 per share of Activision Blizzard – a 45 percent premium to Friday’s closing price of $65.39. This would value the games company at a total of $68.7 billion (60.4 billion euros). That puts Microsoft paying about what Activision was worth six months ago, when its stock price faltered over initial reports of sexism and discrimination against employees and slipped below the $100 threshold. By November, the stock had plummeted to $57.
Activision’s stock rose more than 25 percent on the day of the announcement.
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