Take-Two CEO on Zynga acquisition, GTA remake reviews and more
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Monday 7th February 2022
Take-Two today released its financial results for the holiday quarter showing single-digit sales growth that beat its forecast, but the big news around the company remains its $12.7 billion deal to acquire Zynga.
In a pre-earnings briefing call with GamesIndustry.biz, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick discusses the two companies' approaches to acquisition strategies.
Where Take-Two has largely characterized its approach as opportunistic, Zynga has been aggressive on the acquisitions front for years. Assuming the deal closes as expected in Take-Two's first quarter (April-June), should we expect Zynga to slow down on the acquisitions front?
"We will have a really strong balance sheet and a powerful [profit and loss statement]," Zelnick says. "We'll certainly be in a position to pursue the same strategy with regard to capital allocation that we've always pursued. We support organic growth -- which has to date largely been our story -- we return capital to the shareholders when it makes sense, and we pursue inorganic growth when we see an opportunity to bring great intellectual property and great teams into our enterprise on an accretive basis.
"I think collectively we'll continue to have that approach and I think there will be ongoing opportunity to build the business in the same way that we have built it."
"These are rare assets. I'm not sure what you're seeing is a trend, but I guess we'll find out"
Zelnick on acquisitions
Acquisitions have dominated a lot of industry discourse this year, with January alone seeing the Zynga deal as well as Microsoft's deal for Activision Blizzard and Sony picking up Bungie. Some analysts have told us to expect consolidation to continue apace and
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