Angry Investors Crush Angry Birds Maker

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Angry Investors Crush Angry Birds Maker

© AntonioGuillem / iStock

Rovio Entertainment, most well-known as the maker of Angry Birds games, suffered a stock sell-off of over 44% to €5.50 as it posted poor results and an even worse forecast.

The starkest indication is how much revenue growth slowed:

For the full year 2017:

Rovio’s revenue grew 55 percent to 297.2 million euros (191.7 million euros)
Games: revenue grew 55.9 percent to 248.0 million euros (159.0 million euros)

For the fourth quarter of 2017:

Rovio’s revenue grew 17.0 percent to 73.9 million euros (63.2 million euros)
Games: revenue grew 42.3 percent to 66.1 million euros (46.5 million euros)

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Management boasted that EBIT more than doubled to €10.4 million in the fourth quarter compared to the same period of last year. Investors obviously were not impressed.

As for the 2018 forecast:

Rovio Group revenue is expected to be 260-300 million euros in 2018 (297 million euros in 2017). Rovio’s profitability as measured by earnings before interest and tax excluding items affecting comparability is expected to be 9 to 11 percent (10.6 percent in 2017).

The company, in other words, does not expect to grow.

Like some games, Angry Birds may have hit its peak demand. This has happened at other game companies that rely heavily on one or two games for most of their revenue. And, if this demand has peaked, Rovio investors have to live with the fact that the company’s best days are behind it.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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