Analyst: EA Will Have Taken Over Take 2 on Monday
- Scribbled on May 15th, 2008 by Jonah Falcon
- Filed in Industry News, Rumor Mill, WTF
Videogaming 24/7 is reporting that Lazard Capital’s Colin Sebastian is stating Electronic Arts will have bought out Take 2 on Monday, May 19.
Expect update on TTWO bid by Monday morning,” he said. “We continue to believe that the current offer of $25.74 per share would be accretive to earnings for Electronic Arts, as well as fill several meaningful product gaps.”
Why, sure. After losing almost half a billion dollars and taking out a billion dollar loan, it’s primed for a major purchase. Of course, if the folks at Rockstar say, “See ya. You can have the Grand Theft Auto license - we’ll just make it with a different name”, and ex-MVP Baseball dev Ben Brinkman continues to foul up MLB 2K, EA may Atari itself in the ground.
May 15th, 2008 at 11:30 am
EA will have to work pretty hard to Atari itself, if they liquidated one or two franchises they’d be fine.
However, debt isn’t always a bad thing if you show positive revenue (even if you burn it all to cover head count, and such).
EA is definitely in a better position than Take-Two is, which is probably why their Bullying them (pun intended).
I’d be curious to see if EA “Sierra’s” themself out of existence. That is, buying so many smaller companies that the head count, sheer overhead of management, politics and mis-communications drive down their productivity until they, themselves, are purchased.