The company that gave you Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega Sammy, has made a $776 million bid for Rovio, the company best known for its Angry Birds franchise of games and movies. Leo Lewis and Tim Bradshaw report in the Financial Times:
Sega Sammy, the Japanese gamesmaker behind the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has launched a €706mn ($776mn) offer for Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish group that gave the world Angry Birds.
The €9.25 a share offer values the mobile games pioneer at almost 20 per cent below the price at which Rovio went public five and a half years ago, when it debuted with a market valuation of €896mn.
In a joint statement, Sega Sammy said it had based its bid on projections that the global gaming market would expand to $263.3bn by 2026. In particular, it said, the share of mobile gaming would grow to 56 per cent of the overall market.
Rovio’s share price jumped almost 18 per cent on Monday morning following the announcement.
Analysts said that Sega Sammy’s bid for Rovio was driven by its ambitions to build a “super game” along the lines of Fortnite or Minecraft that create large global communities of gamers.
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