Funcom CEO sells company stock

by Shawn Schuster on Aug 25th 2008 1:30PM

Fantasy, Real life, Age of Conan, Economy, MMO industry

Sure it may be completely innocent, but it's interesting nonetheless. According to a recent announcement, Funcom's CEO Trond Aas has recently sold 400,000 shares of his company's stock. The announcement also states that these shares were sold "primarily to cover Mr. Aas' acquisition costs of the shares as well as accumulated wealth tax costs of the past six years as a result of the holdings in Funcom." This 400,000 number represents only a fraction of the shares owned by the CEO.

While this Brighthub article tends to focus on the timing of the sale, pointing out that Age of Conan has already lost nearly half of its customers, no official connection has been made. However, the stock's price has fallen quite dramatically lately, closing at $13.60 per share on August 22, 2008, which is down from $55.50 per share on Age of Conan's release in May.

Update: This is a take on the Brighthub article more than anything, blaming AoC for everything, not to be confused with this original post. Plus, we get a look at the actual announcement about the stock sales itself. Sorry for any confusion of duplicates.

Source

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, ceo, funcom, stock, trond-aas

Reader Comments (3)

Their share price may have dropped significantly from May but if you look at their longer term performance, i.e. take a 1 year 3 year or 5 year view and their share price now is around the average. There was obviously something that drove the share price up, i.e the Conan launch. People on the internet are speculating over the share price when really there's no issue.

Regarding his sales, maybe he was hit with a tax bill. If you read into it more, his sell up is very minor on the scale of things and he only owns 2.25% of company shares afterwards anyway.

It did say it was to help pay for taxes and so on, if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck then it's probably a duck; he most likely got hit with a tax bill and had to sell up to pay it off.

http://www.massively.com/2008/08/15/funcom-quarterly-report-reveals-age-of-conan-performance/

Besides that, what Neil said.

this is the 2nd news about the funcom shares with the wrong currency
Youre aware of the fact that not the whole world pays with Dollar?
The Funcom Share is noted in NOK, thats no Dollar.