Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was, as usual, at the forefront of the company's Q2 2020 earnings call with his prepared remarks and his far from banal replies to questions from investors.
For example, the Take-Two CEO believes there'll continue to be increased activity surrounding mergers and acquisitions in the games industry.
Look, we have seen an acceleration in M&A activity. Obviously, Microsoft is acquiring Bethesda, for example, which is a significant, I believe seven some odd billion dollar transaction. So I think you're going to continue to see increased M&A activity, just because of the heat around the category and the amount of capital that's being deployed by big companies to pursue it.
From our point of view, we have almost $2.4 billion in cash. We have no debt. And we are anxious in it to build our business aggressively doing so. And we use our capital to support for organic for primary story at Take-Two. We also will use our cash to acquire companies when they're strategically consonant and when those deals are accretive, and we return capital to the shareholders on a regular basis through buybacks. And that'll continue to be our approach.
This is particularly interesting when you consider that the Take-Two CEO had suggested back in September that Microsoft would be acquiring other studios. Surely enough, that happened in October with arguably the most literally incredible deal, the acquisition of Bethesda's parent company Zenimax for $7.5 billion in cash.
As such, following this fresh statement from Strauss Zelnick, we'll certainly keep an eye on any new big mergers or acquisitions happening soon throughout the industry.
His words also suggest Take-Two could do something of its own. We know that one of their labels, Rockstar Games, recently acquired Ruffian Games (now Rockstar Dundee), though that was admittedly a relatively small deal; perhaps something bigger is brewing. Meanwhile, stay tuned on Wccftech for all the latest news on the games industry.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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