Angry Birds maker Rovio could lay off 130 staff

The maker of the Angry Birds series of games, Rovio, could shed 130 staff members as it struggles to sustain the growth of recent years.

In a recent blog post entitled Towards a Simplified Organisation, Rovio CEO Mikael Hed spoke about the need to “be the best at adapting to change.”

Hed admits that his “entrepreneurial” company has been “building our team on assumptions of faster growth than have materialized.”

The result is that Rovio has decided to simplify its business around its three key areas: games, media, and consumer products.  This simplification, of course, means jobs losses – as many as 130 jobs could go from the company’s Finland base, which works out to 16 percent of its workforce.

Last year, Rovio’s profits slumped dramatically by 52 percent, bringing them down to €26.3 million despite increased revenue of €156 million. This prompted Hed to announce his planned departure from the CEO seat from January 2015.

“It is never easy to consider changes like this,” said Hed of these recently announced plans, “but it is better to do them sooner rather than later, when we are in a good place to reignite growth.”

Reigniting Rovio’s growth may partly occur through the recent announcement of an Angry Birds film, which will hit cinemas in 2016. The voice cast will include Josh Gad, Peter Dinklage, and Maya Rudolph.

Of course, the key issue with Rovio has always been that it’s hugely reliant on a single franchise. In the five years since the launch of the original Angry Birds game on iOS, the company has been unable to find anything outside of the franchise with the same reach or appeal.

Indeed, half of last year’s aforementioned revenue came from Angry Birds merchandise.

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