In a rather uncommon move, Ubisoft has suddenly delayed the announcement of its quarterly financial results and halted trading of its shares.
The company shared the news via press release, mentioning that the financial results for the first half of the fiscal year 2025-2026 will be shared “in the coming days” and adding that it has asked Euronext to stop trading of Ubisoft’s shares until that happens.
If you’re unfamiliar with Euronext, it’s the entity that operates the stock markets in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Norway, and Portugal.
No information was provided on the reasons behind this stop, and Ubisoft just mentioned that it’ll inform the market of the day when trading will restart.
This was a very sudden move, as the announcement of the financial results was supposed to happen today at 6:00 p.m. local time in Paris.
While no explanation was provided, this kind of move is pretty much always an indication of upcoming big news that would influence the position of the company affected on the market, like a big acquisition or merger. It’s a mechanism to protect both the company and investors.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the news is necessarily bad. This kind of event is rather neutral, and the outcome is not very predictable, as it may be triggered by a number of situations.
Of course, we know that Ubisoft is reorganizing into “Creative Houses,” the first of which is the subsidiary in partnership with Tencent announced in March.
Back in July, when the company announced its previous financial results, its executive said that the process of closing the transaction with Tencent was “going well,” and the company expected to complete it by the end of the year pending regulatory approval.
The full organization of the Creative Houses was also to be announced by the end of the calendar year 2025.
Another possibility that would explain today’s move could be regulatory opposition to the completion of the deal with Tencent, but this is just my personal speculation, and we won’t know until an announcement is made.
It’s worth mentioning that at least the PR department at Ubisoft appears to be working normally, as we received a press release about the release of Anno 117: Pax Romana after this announcement.
