👉 Background: Ubisoft Entertainment is the French video game publisher that started in the 1980s, and is best known for games like Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance, Prince of Persia, and Watch Dogs.

👉 What happened: Over the past 12 months, Ubisoft's share price has plummeted more than 40%. As a result, Ubisoft is allegedly considering going private and delisting from Euronext, a European stock exchange. Ubisoft’s founding family, and Chinese tech company Tencent, are thinking about buying the company out and taking it private.

👉 What else: Ubisoft’s found it challenging to come out of a pandemic rut:

• They delayed the release of new games, and cancelled some too
• Ubisoft cut its 2025 financial year earnings guidance to 1.95 billion euros, down from the 2.3 billion it made in 2024

So it’s not surprising that shareholders were putting pressure on Ubisoft to bring about some changes.

What's the key learning?

💡When profits sink, shareholders often want changes at the helm. And sometimes, shareholder pressure can be enough to bring about major changes in a business.

💡In Ubisoft’s case, minority shareholders have been pushing for Ubisoft to go private… or for a strategic investor to come in.

💡In 2017, Yahoo's investors became more and more frustrated with its poor performance. One of its investor Starboard Value bought a stake in Yahoo in 2014 and pushed for major restructuring, which it finally achieved when Yahoo was sold to Verizon.