Angry Birds maker Rovio cuts 16% of workforce

Rovio, the Finnish mobile games maker behind Angry Birds, said on Thursday it planned to cut 16 per cent of its workforce as the business struggles to find new ways to grow.

The loss of 130 jobs at the company is the latest blow to Finland's technology sector after Microsoft in July cut 1,100 workers at Nokia, a company that once led the market for mobile phones.

It also highlights the volatility of the video games sector. Zynga, the US games maker that built its business on Facebook, has made more than 800 people redundant over the past two years as it struggled to adapt to the shift to mobile gaming.

Mikael Hed, Rovio chief executive, said in a blog post on Thursday that the company had been building its workforce "on assumptions of faster growth than have materialised".

In 2013, following three years of rapid growth, Rovio hired 300 new employees, taking staff numbers to 800.

But Rovio's profits tumbled 52 per cent to €26.9m last year, with revenues largely flat at €156m. Almost half of Rovio's revenues came from toys and other consumer products, while the company has been developing a feature-length animation film to launch in 2016.

Rovio said on Thursday that it planned to "simplify our organisation around our three key businesses with the highest growth potential: games, media, and consumer products".

Angry Birds was one of the earliest hits in the era of smartphones and has been downloaded more than 2bn times. The game, in which players use slingshots to launch birds at pigs, ranks as the number one paid-for mobile application of all time.

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Supercell, the Finnish company behind Clash of Clans, reported that revenues surged from $101m in 2012 to $892m last year. King, which makes Candy Crush Saga, this year raised $500m in a US initial public offering at a valuation of more than $7bn, but in August it cut its sales outlook for the year as players spent less.

Mr Hed, who has run Rovio for the past five years, plans to step down as chief executive at the start of next year. He will be succeeded by Pekka Rantala, a former senior staffer at Nokia and chief executive of Hartwall, a Finnish drinks company.

Finland is still reeling from Microsoft's decision to cut nearly a quarter of the Nokia's workforce. The shock of job cuts at Rovio is all the greater because the company had been seen as a symbol of Finland's continuing business dynamism in the wake of the Nokia debacle.

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