If they will deliver with their Avatar and Star Wars projects, they will make grands. If they fail, they will be probably face tough times, given the huge amount of investments they put on them. They could be their Shen Mue.
I also suspect that those games could be both the source of Ubisoft's woes and their potential redemption.
While delays happen, if they happen after you've signed two big film contracts things might get tricky for any company. I'm making the assumption that both games would require Ubisoft to pay hefty license fees in advance rather than just offer a royalty when the games are released and that could leave Ubisoft having depleted reserves and the delays to any of their games would mean they have fewer ways to bring money in.
I'm not really sure how to interpret this message from Yves. I don't know if he regularly sends messages to staff en masse, or if this is unprecedented and indicates frustration or worry from the top, but I'd be surprised if those games couldn't be leveraged to get investment to pay the bills until they're released. If Ubisoft are in big trouble as people are suggesting, I assume that two big licensed games could make the difference - but I also assume that the games have to be good to be a success and that that is why Yves has sent this message.
I wonder if the correct read of the situation of this message is "everything will be ok, as long as we can get a couple of great games out, but we might not be able to survive two expensive flops and a series of delays"
I say that assuming that people want a Star Wars game (fairly safe bet) and an Avatar game (less sure) and they have the potential to bring in serious revenue. In a way there's little to hint that Ubisoft would be in trouble if there weren't a series of bad news events hitting them over and over. Their own IP, Assassin's Creed (garbage, worthless IP that it is, according to the other Ubisoft thread) brought in a billion dollars with it's most recent outing. I assume there's another in the series on the way and that the company can expect to see similar revenue from it.
I'm not saying that it won't happen, but for Ubisoft to fold, things would presumably have to go catastrophically badly given their IP and the licenses they have in the pipeline. That that is being talked about suggests that things must have gone very, very badly since Valhalla came out.