David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…PitchBook's got this around 2003 for the Sega and Sammy merger, and they've just been Sega Sammy publicly traded ever since. More stats from PitchBook today, they're a $4.3 billion market cap company. If you back out their cash, they have an enterprise value of about $3.6 billion. Last year, they did $2.7 billion in revenue. Clearly, the market doesn't think much of them. With a revenue multiple of 1.3, it's a little bit of a zombie company. Yeah. This is a good spot to transition to analysis here. I think there's a couple of interesting things to talk about in the playbook, and then we have a fun way to end the episode. One of the things I want to talk about is, despite all of these machinations and mistakes, they do have some pretty great IP in the company. The Sonic movie, it's no Mario movie, but it did pretty well. People still love Sonic the Hedgehog. The Yakuza franchise is strong. There are lots of other franchises within Sega. Is there almost, I'm wondering, an LVMH, Bernard Arnault style takeover opportunity here? Could you come and acquire either the whole Sega Sammy company or the Sega IP out of it and do it right? There's so much more that could be done with this stuff. I don't think so. My take on this whole thing is that Sonic was a one trick pony, and that they never really found an effective way to expand the franchise. They came out with a bunch more stuff that had Sonic on it, but I never wanted to play 3D Sonic the way that I wanted to play the original Sonic the Hedgehog side scroller game. It feels to me like there's a lot of nostalgia to play with, but it didn't really create any durable extensible IP or gameplay, frankly.…

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