Guild Esports
Guild Esports; (GILD) is a company in the frontier sector of e-sports.
Despite its infancy the sector grew by 26.7% over the last couple years, Guild has a fully professional E-sports team competing across multiple titles, such as Fortnite,Valorant and Fifa 21.
Whilst it may be a new start-up, the leadership possess considerable know-how. The executive chairman, Carleton Curtis, is the previous chairman of Activision Blizzard holding the role since 2017, the CEO is Kalum Lee Hourd an experienced E-Sports entrepreneur with over 20 years in the industry.
An early backer is sporting legend David Beckham, who has a vast reach in terms of fanbase, sponsorships and connections in the world of sport, as well as 215m fans across his various social media accounts.
The nature of this business means it’s always in competition with fellow esports teams, that said the recent performances suggest the team operates at the highest level:
Notable results to date:
Fortnite:
FNCS: (Season 5) 1st/2nd
FNCS: (Season 6) 3rd
FNCS: All-Star Showdown: 1st
Rocket League:
Spring Cup: (Regional 3) 1st
Spring Major: 3rd/4th
Winter Major: 4th
Valorant:
Challengers: (VCT 1) 3rd/4th
Challengers: (VCT 2) 3rd/4th
Tournaments are a primary source of revenue yet competition can further extend to the sponsorship market given its a vital source of income. Guild has lucrative long term deals with Samsung, Subway and Hyper-X as well as a robust pipeline of potential future sponsors with several deals at advanced stages of negotiations.
This brand awareness has led to a quick rise to 160k followers on Guild channels and 8 million fans on the Guild network. This puts it on track to achieve the target of 1m people in the subscribed fanbase by the end of 2021. The total combined audience when factoring in Guild’s team of content creators, comes to over 15.6m.
Ultimately tournament winnings and sponsorship deals will be defined by the success and profile of their esports players.
At this end they have developed their own academy (in the model of a David Beckham football academy).
Primarily the academy is an online subscription based tutorial service for £4.99 a month, this model is scalable globally and will be a major source of revenue for the guild.However its much more important role is that of a talent screen, providing a means to identify talented players early.
Players who are at the top of their game will benefit from the academy’s unique ‘Path to Pro’ system, which nurtures the individual from promising prospect to high level athlete. The graduates of this ‘Path to Pro’ system will then have the opportunity to compete for one of Guild’s professional teams, ensuring a conveyor-belt of new talent and future stars.
This is by far the most interesting asset of the academy due to the transfer opportunities. If an investment is considered on forward looking assumptions this is the golden egg.
Professional Fortnite player TaySon joined Guild on a no-fee transfer and on 01/07/21 guild agreed to sell him to a Saudi Arabian esports team for a transfer fee of $115,000……REALMONEY!
It wasn’t that long ago top level professional footballers couldn’t command a transfer fee of £100,000 this industry is now worth billions, it is therefore not beyond the realms of possibility to assume that if E-sports becomes accepted as a mainstream sport, the stars of the sport will be able to command hefty price tags, and through the Academy, Guild will have an ever-increasing pool of talented players and therefore transfer opportunities.
Of course it’s very early days, but another favourable long term trend to consider is the digital dematerialisation of things e.g. streaming services, CBDC’s and NFT’s.
In the future this could synthesise with
the need for financially secure but ageing sports/sports franchises to remain relevant in the digital age, meaning it won’t be long before established sports teams/governing bodies have their own esports teams and host their own variants of competitions, which in turn increase the chance of mainstream adoption.
Guild esports is in a dominant position to capitalise on the metaverse that’s approaching.
Guild had nearly £16 million of cash at its year-end results, so no share dilution will be happening any time soon, internally it has revenues forecast at £7.2 million this year doubling to £13m in 2022, and given it has already secured £7.5m of sponsorship this year it appears to be on track to achieve these results.
One of the only reasons for the current stagnation in share price, is after it’s initial IPO the lockup period expired, insiders sold and the share price suffered, despite this the volume is increasing and it’s testing the upper resistance level of 8p and looks to soon be trading at all time highs.
Overall I believe the outlook is good, it’s led by a knowledgeable team, it has serious connections, the team is performing well and has an ever-increasing pool of talent plus it has opened the door to a potentially huge transfer market.
If you factor in it’s already profitable at this early stage and is on track to achieve its forecasts along with the macro trends of the reopening of of venues to stage live events and increasing digitalisation of society I believe the future looks bright.
SoZ4DaEssaYy…..GLTA!!
https://www.reddit.com/r/StockMarket/comments/ojb04a/guild_esports/