An investor conference call is scheduled in less than an hour, but Activision is already announcing they’ve had a record quarter, making $1.4B.
Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision Blizzard, stated, ”With over $1.4 billion of GAAP net revenues and $0.42 of GAAP EPS our record first-quarter performance was driven by digital sales and the continued strength of Activision Publishing’s Call of Duty and Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft franchises. Digital content continues to represent a significant portion of our revenues and increased by about $100 million year over year, enabling us to deliver record first-quarter operating margins and earnings per share. The Call of Duty: Black Ops First Strike content pack shattered Xbox LIVE® launch records, surpassing 1.4 million downloads in the first 24 hours alone, and Blizzard’s Battle.net service continues to grow its service offerings. To date, Call of Duty: Black Ops players have logged more than 1.2 billion online hours of online gameplay.”
The conference is expected to cover the following financial items:
•During the first quarter, Call of Duty: Black Ops became the best-selling game of all time in dollars across the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, the PlayStation 3 computer entertainment system and the PC in the U.S. and Europe and was also the #1 game in the U.S. and Europe for the quarter.
•For the first quarter, Activision Blizzard had three top-10 PC titles with Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft: Cataclysm and StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty and Activision Publishing’s Call of Duty: Black Ops.
•Total unique online gamers playing Call of Duty: Black Ops were more than 33% greater than the total unique online gamers who played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 for the first five months after each game’s release.
•During the quarter, digital downloads of the Call of Duty: Black Ops First Strike content pack were more than 20% higher than digital downloads of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Stimulus Pack during the comparable period in 2010.
•Since Call of Duty: Black Ops First Strike launched on February 1, players have spent an average of 58 minutes per day playing online, exceeding the 55 minutes the average user spends per day on Facebook.
•As of March 31, 2011, Activision Blizzard had purchased approximately 31 million shares of its common stock, for approximately $344 million, under the $1.5 billion stock repurchase program authorized by its Board of Directors on February 9, 2011.
•Activision Blizzard will pay a cash dividend of $0.165 per common share on May 11, 2011 to shareholders of record as of March 16, 2011. The dividend represents a 10% increase over the dividend that was issued in 2010.
According to Activision, the future holds new content for Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo franchises, and its next-generation MMO which has yet to be revealed, known only as “Codename Titan”.
The firm also promise a digital platform for the Call of Duty franchise. Bungie’s next game and a new Spyro’s Adventure game are also coming in the future.
