Playtika offers €750M for Rovio, Angry Birds developer

On January 19, Playtika, a leading mobile gaming company and monetization platform, announced it submitted a revised proposal to the Finnish Rovio Entertainment to acquire it for €9.05 per share in cash.

• This is the second acquisition offer to Rovio, but this time with a better price. The first was presented to the Board of Directors of Rovio on November 16, 2022, with a price of €8.5 per share. The second one, dated January 19, 2023, offers €9.05 per share. Rovio has nearly 83 million shares, and at a price of €9.5 per share, the total amount of the deal is more than €750 million (Bloomberg and a number of other media give this amount). Other media, such as Globes, estimate the deal more modestly — at €690 million.
• This offer does not imply that both companies have reached an agreement. The deal values Rovio more expensive by 60% than the company’s closing price on Thursday, January 19, 2023, according to Bloomberg.
• Rovio was once one of the loudest success stories in mobile development. Its famous Angry Birds franchise appeared in app stores for the first time back in 2009, and is still the main source of revenue for the Finnish company (more than 80%). Angry Birds became the first mobile game to reach 1 billion downloads, and in 2017 Rovio went on IPO. But the company’s shares have slumped, and now it is trading at half the price of its initial public offering:

About Playtika

Playtika is a Ukrainian-Israeli company that became a pioneer in the development of games in the social casino genre. It was sold to the owner of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas for $250 million, and then to a consortium of Chinese companies led by GIANT for $4.4 billion. Two years ago, the company went public.

In Ukraine, the company has offices in Kyiv, Dnipro, and Vinnytsia. As of 2021, the number of employees in Ukrainian offices reached 1,000 people. In total, the company has 4,100 employees worldwide. In December, it became known that Playtika will cut about 800 employees worldwide, and about 10% of the staff in Ukraine.