Learning From EA's Annual Report 18
eldavojohn writes "GamePolitics rounded up some 'fun facts' from EA's annual report (PDF) and found among them: 'EA's failed bid to gobble up Take-Two cost the company $21 million,' while 'GameStop and Wal-Mart are EA's biggest customers; each accounts for 14% of EA sales.' It also shows that 'game content legislation and its potential effect on sales' concerns EA, as does the potential for a 'Hot Coffee incident.' More evidence that while it's good to be the big dog, it comes with a lot of responsibility and worrying."
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One wouldn't be the first post if the first post was zero - zero would.
First indicates a relative position. Zero is an index.
What exactly are we supposed to learn? (Score:1)
Oh? People don't like being told that "Big Brother" knows best? Or that they are sociopaths for playing violent video games? NO WAY!
Seriously, I wonder if there was some kind of dare between the submitter and his friends to see who could make a story out of an annual report.
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EA is a monstrous company with lots of waste and inefficiency?
Yeah, I mean just look at page 4.
Re:What exactly are we supposed to learn? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't see too much waste - more like a tech company that needs to do a lot of development and R&D to keep afloat.
Every single listed U.S. company must state risks to their business in a 10k filing to the SEC. It's always interesting, but pretty routine.
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I don't think you are from around here...
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No, I read the comment which said to read page 4. So I did.
However, reading 10k filings is actually not particularly difficult. Try it some time, they are actually quite enlightening. You can pretty much skip over the financial stuff, unless you are crunching numbers and undertaking fundamental analysis of the company.
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Where's the 'being eaten by a grue' risk, I don't see it...
Re:What exactly are we supposed to learn? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to see more people take the time to produce accessible stories based on the information in major companies annual reports. There is a lot of information in them, and given the various requirements placed upon companies by law, and the requirement that they are published regularly they can provide a lot of very informative data.
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Summary links to wrong report (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Summary links to wrong report (Score:5, Interesting)
EA's 2009 10-K [sec.gov]
To me, the 21 million loss on Take-Two looks like small change to a company like EA. The bigger story that jumps off the income statement is one that most companies are dealing with these days, loss of goodwill. EA took a 368 million loss on goodwill impairment. What that means, for those who do not understand goodwill, is that their 2006 acquisition of JAMDAT, which they turned into is now worth 368 million less to them than it is worth on their balance sheet. That basically means they are not making the money on their cellphone business that they expected to be making.
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Wal-Mart has 14% means a lot (Score:2)
If it is same Wal-Mart which demands artists demands them to censor their work to show up on their stores and EA is a gigantic game company, we will wait a bit (!) for innovations and unique games to show up.
Or... We better start donating to some great open source (and massively multi platform) games which appear on sourceforge etc.
Another interesting takeway: (Score:2)