Blue Star Capital’s Guild Esports wins fourth major esports trophy

Guild Esports (GILD) has won its fourth major esports trophy after one of its Fortnight players won first place in the Fortnite Champion Series (“FNCS”) Grande Royale on 21 November 2021.

Guild, which is co-owned by David Beckham and the first esport organisation to have listed on London’s stock exchange, said its Fortnite pro-player, Henrik Mclean (‘Hen’), achieved first place in the FNCS Grande Royale, taking home a share of the $2.5 million prize pool. 

It said its players Anas El-Abd (‘Anas’), Jannis Matwin (‘JannisZ’) and Lennard Sill (‘Rezon ay’) rounded off the showing by Guild, finishing in 3rd, 4th and 14th place, respectively.

The company told investors that victory has ‘propelled’ Guild to the number 1 ranking spot in Europe and earned Guild’s pro-players a total of $356,500 in prize money from the event.

Kal Hourd, Chief Executive, said: “The FNCS Grand Royale was a dominating display from Guild’s entire roster, and taking home our fourth championship trophy was a testament to the hard work put in by everyone at Guild over the last year. There’s so much more yet to come.”

As one of the most popular esports, Fortnite has over 350 million players worldwide. In December 2020, a record 15.3 million concurrent players took part in the Galactus in-game event, an event that was watched by 3.4 million fans on Twitch and YouTube gaming.

Last week, Guild signed Lennard Sill, a German fornite player known as “Rezon ay” or “Rezon”, a 17-time tournament winner, as the newest member of its Fortnite team. It said his signing maintains Guild’s standing “as the number two Fortnite team in Europe.”

Rezon has a large social media following with over 700,000 subscribers; 369,000 followers on Twitch, 151,000 on Twitter, 140,000 on Instagram and 139,000 on YouTube subscribers. 

In its half-year results to 31 March 2021 released in June, Guild Esports said it was on track to achieve its first-year sponsorship revenue targets as revenues continued to grow strongly.   

The esports organisation co-owned by David Beckham hailed its position as the First esports team’s organisation to list on the LSE, which executed whilst raising £20m in the process.  

At the time, the Company stated that its new business pipeline ‘continues to be robust’ and that it is currently in discussions with potential new sponsors to sign further deals for its core inventory (being main shirt partners, HQ naming rights, academy sponsors and regional partners), as well as exploring opportunities for strategic partnerships and content deals.  

Guild Esport’s investors include London-listed Blue Star Capital. To date, the investment company, which is focused on investing in new technologies, has invested around £0.706 million in Guild Esports, and holds around a 5.95% of the issued share capital of Guild.   

Guild was admitted to the Official List and started trading on the standard segment of the London Stock Exchange in October 2020 to take advantage of the growing esports markets.   

Blue Star says the esports market is experiencing significant growth. In 2020 it was estimated at c.495m viewers and is projected to reach around 646 million viewers by 2023.   This is expected to result in revenues growing over the same period from $950m to $1.60bn.