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Gfinity CEO and exec chairman step down as share price plummets

Gfinity CEO and exec chairman step down as share price plummets

Esports firm Gfinity is in choppy financial waters with both its CEO and executive chairman standing down from their positions.

In a release on its investor site, the company said that chief executive Graham Wallace and exec chair Garry Cook have left their positions effective immediately. Global commercial and brand officer John Clarke has been appointed CEO, while the company's co-founder and president Neville Upton has taken the chair position.

Gfinity says that it expects to report that it made £3.5m ($4.2m) in revenue for the first six months of this financial year, with a £2.1m ($2.5m) profit and £2.4m ($2.9m) operating loss. The road isn't looking bright in the future, either, with the company saying that the second half of this fiscal year has been hit by commercial opportunities that haven't panned out and partnerships which have been slower to materialise than anticipated.

Cook joined Gfinity in spring 2018. Since then, the company's share price has fallen through the floor from £12.75 ($15.34) to just 83p ($1) on Friday, March 13th. At the time of writing, they stand at just 32p ($0.39), with the company valued at just £1.56m ($1.87m).

Incidentally, that's only about double what Cook and Wallace were being paid before they stood down. According to UK Investor Magazine, Cook was paid a salary and £120,000 bonus totalling in £412,400 ($496,234) last year, while Wallace was paid £369,875 ($445,065)


PCGamesInsider Contributing Editor

Alex Calvin is a freelance journalist who writes about the business of games. He started out at UK trade paper MCV in 2013 and left as deputy editor over three years later. In June 2017, he joined Steel Media as the editor for new site PCGamesInsider.biz. In October 2019 he left this full-time position at the company but still contributes to the site on a daily basis. He has also written for GamesIndustry.biz, VGC, Games London, The Observer/Guardian and Esquire UK.