Hello All,
I often watch NBR (Nightly Business Report) on PBS Tv channel. Where they mentioned tonight that EA is letting go of 1100 employees and closing 12 locations. (up from 9 locations announced in Dec. 19th, 2008)
On page 9 of the conference call script from Feb. 3rd mentions this blurb:
[quote]Second. Personnel Costs.
o Headcount – We are reducing headcount by 1,100 people – or 11%
of our workforce. This includes headcount at all levels – staff,
managers, directors, and VPs and above – and across all functions
and geographies. Most of the reductions are in high cost locations.
We expect 3/4 of the reductions to be completed by fiscal year-end.
o We are also eliminating merit increases in FY10 and finally
o We continue to take advantage of low cost locations. At the end of
FY09 – we expect to have 19% of our employees in low cost
locations – vs. 13% a year ago.
• Third. Facilities. We expect to close 12 facilities – up from the nine we
communicated on Dec 19th.[/quote][URL=http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ERTS/540252845x0x270149/4b78bb8b-1fcf-477e-848d-c246d47b7cc4/Q309Script_0203_FINAL.pdf][B]Link[/B][/URL] (Adobe PDF needed)
Here's the [URL=http://investors.ea.com/events.cfm][B]Link[/B][/URL] to listen to the EA conference calls.
Further down on the conference call script it gives the product arrival of Bioware's: Dragon Age (Q3 2009) and the next Mass Effect 2 (Q4 2009) game.
With a record sale of games this past holiday season. It doesn't seem to matter in this economic climate to game publishers.
Everyone's on a fiscal diet, will that mean fewer game title release's through out this coming year?