Media holdings company Modern Times Group (MTG) has been on a repurchasing spree, taking back 176,970 of its own class B shares between 27 February and 3 March 2023.
This has been done under the repurchase programme, which was initiated by the company’s Board of Directors as a strategy to bring further shareholder value. It should also better optimise MTG’s capital structure.
At MTG 2022 Game Day, one topic of discussion was how to earn for 10 years or more from a mobile game.
Repurchasing shares
MTG’s share repurchasing programme was first announced last year, on 25 October 2022. It will be running until this year’s Annual General Meeting and has the aim of recovering as many as 4,618,818 of its sold shares through buybacks, with the maximum expenditure to achieve this being SEK 400 million (approximately $38 million).
Another of the objectives is to reduce the company’s share capital through subsequent cancellations.
Following last week’s share acquisitions, as of 3 March 2023 MTG has a total of 5,540,433 class B shares and 6,324,343 class C shares. These still only represent a fraction of the universal shares in MTG, however, as there exist 134,035,940 in total.
In class B shares, MTG’s biggest day of repurchasing in the period was the first; on 27 February, 36,970 shares were repurchased at a weighted average share price of SEK 73.0021. Each subsequent day through to 3 March, 35,000 shares were repurchased at fluctuating, though marginally cheaper, costs.
Modern Times Group properly entered the games industry in 2016 via its investment in InnoGames. Back in January 2022, the former announced the sale of ESL Gaming to Savvy Games Group for over $1 billion as part of a pivot to "a pure-play mobile gaming company", and since made it onto our Top 50 Mobile Game Makers list.
The company made some noteworthy acquisitions through the pandemic, such as the creator of Bloons Tower Defense and New Zealand studio Ninja Kiwi, the development studio Hutch, and Indian word games developer PlaySimple.
