Angry Birds Rovio
Playtika, the Israeli mobile gaming giant, is giving up on its bid to acquire Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish firm that is best known for the “Angry Birds” video game. Playtika informed stockholders it has “ended preliminary discussions” on the acquisition. There is no word yet as to why the negotiations broke down.
When the company first made its takeover bid official two months ago, Playtika offered to pay 60% above market value for Rovio stock at €9.05 ($9.95) per share for a total of €690 million ($738 million) in cash.
At the time, Playtika Chief Executive Officer Robert Antokol explained the reasons for his company’s bid for Angry Birds saying, “We firmly believe the combination of Rovio’s renowned IP and scale of its user base, together with our best-in-class monetization and game operations capabilities, will create tremendous value for our shareholders.”
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First released in 2009, Rovio’s Angry Birds focuses on a flock of angry birds who try to save their eggs from green-colored pigs. The game became so popular that it spawned not one, but two feature films. The animated movies starred Hollywood stars like Jason Sudeikis and Josh Gad.
Playtika was founded in 2010, by Robert Antokol and Uri Shahak (the son of former Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli Minister Amnon Lipkin-Shahak). Robert Antokol still serves from the beginning as CEO, and chairman since June 2020. The company currently has a market cap of almost $3.5 billion. This is way down of its one-time $11 billion valuation.
Founded in 2003, Rovio Entertainment Corporation is a global, mobile-first games company that creates, develops and publishes mobile games, which have been downloaded over 4.5 billion times so far. Rovio is best known for the global Angry Birds brand, which started as a popular mobile game in 2009, and has since evolved from games to various entertainment and consumer products in brand licensing. Today, Rovio offers multiple mobile games, animations and produced The Angry Birds Movie in 2016. Its sequel, The Angry Birds Movie 2, was released in 2019. Rovio is headquartered in Finland and the company’s shares are listed on the main list of NASDAQ Helsinki stock exchange with the trading code ROVIO.
