AJ Investments is once again speaking out about the game company they wish they owned more of.
Two weeks ago, they posted a public letter accusing the Guillemots of mismanaging Ubisoft, and also of colluding with TenCent to quietly buy back ownership of the company. As reported by Reuters, AJ Investments has written a new letter to the company, this time held privately for now.
Reuters was able to say that the letter said this:
“We call on the management of Ubisoft to allow the sale of the company to third parties or private equity firms at a fair price.”
The letter also claims that they have support from 10 % of the company’s shareholders to sell the company. AJ declined to name their supporters, but they did confirm that Ubisoft management would be talking to their shareholders this coming Tuesday, which would be October 1, 2024.
That may be connected to Yves Guillemot’s promise yesterday that the company would go to a board review, with the details of that review coming at the end of October. And you don’t need to have a diploma in finance or business management to understand that these communications are signs of an internal power struggle going on right now.
We hadn’t seen this much tension within a company’s management since the late Nintendo president and CEO Satoru Iwata cut his salary to placate investors about Wii U’s performance. This may all be memory holed by even some video game press, but Iwata actually did this two years in a row, and other Nintendo executives, including Shigeru Miyamoto, received pay cuts as well.
What everyone remembers about this news is Iwata’s personal statement that he did this so that he would not have to lay off any of the developers making video games, a seemingly impossible standard for the industry to meet in 2024. But there was also a lot of talk among investors and analysts that Nintendo shareholders would have wanted Iwata to be fired, or at least removed from being president.
Of course, Iwata was not just beloved by fans, but respected for his demonstrated business acumen in the industry. He was not facing years of accusations of a toxic workplace, that led to frontpage news in major publications and lawsuits filed against former executives.
There are many reasons that Ubisoft is facing a completely different set of circumstances now. The big one among those, is that Japanese laws gave Nintendo a level of protection from being acquired by foreign owners. That is not the case with Paris-based Ubisoft, who allegedly faces a group of shareholders led by Slovakia-based AJ Investments.
