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THQ lives to fight another day following Q1 results
THQ walked away from its first quarter, ending June 30, with $133.7 million in sales and income of $15.4 million. Of course, a lot of blood had to be shed to get there.Beyond that, the company's financial release reiterated a lot of the key points the company has been trying to make regarding its turnaround."We have made significant progress reshaping the company," said CEO Brian Farrell. "With the changes implemented over the last several months, we are in a much better position today to deliver on our pipeline of games, beginning with Darksiders 2, which launches next week in North America."That reshaping included new executives, layoffs, closures, the UFC rights sale, the Saints Row product shuffle and...um, we think that's about it? Oh wait, the reverse stock split. Okay, now we think that's it.
Namco Bandai game business up 32% in fiscal quarter, Soulcalibur 5 leads sales
Namco Bandai's Game Software Division brought in 13.8 billion yen ($176.3 million) in its fiscal Q1 (ended June 30), up over last year's 10.4 billion yen. Overall, the "Content Business" that includes game software brought in 57 billion yen ($728.18 million), a 60% increase over the 35.6 billion from the same time last year.The success of Namco's game business is partly due to just brute force – Namco released 46 games worldwide in the quarter, versus 27 last year. Its best selling game for the quarter was Soulcalibur 5, which added 680,000 worldwide sales to its total, for a life-to-date 1.38 million. Its other named best sellers include Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm Generations, which sold 440,000 in the quarter, and the Japan only Toriko Gourmet Survival 2 for PSP, which sold 100,000.
Sharp pain continues with $1.2 billion loss in Q1, drastically lowered forecast for 2012
Having already scraped through a disastrous 2011, Sharp had been banking on making a small but significant profit this year. Those hopes have now evaporated, with the Japanese manufacturer's forecast of 20 billion yen ($250 million) in operating earnings for 2012 being revised down to a 100 billion yen ($1.25 billion) loss. That dose of reality is largely the result of the quarter just gone, in which hardly anyone appears to have bought an Aquos TV (despite the 90-incher being pretty amazing) or a Sharp-made LCD panel, and the company made a 94 billion yen ($1.2 billion) loss in the space of just three months. According to Reuters, as many as 5,000 staff may lose their jobs in the company's first major round of lay-offs.
Take-Two investor call theme: Where's Grand Theft Auto 5?
The first half of Take-Two's question and answer session, during today's first quarter investor call, revolved around the theme of Grand Theft Auto 5 and its current status. Whether directly or indirectly, three questions in a row tried to eke out any details about the game, which appears to be part of the publisher's high revenue projections but still has an official "TBA" release date."Strauss, we've heard nothing, next to nothing, on GTA 5 development over the last couple months," said Mike Hickey of National Alliance Securities. "We've seen a couple screenshots. The game is believed by the street to be implied by your guidance for this fiscal year, but what believability do we have that this game is actually going to come out this year?"CEO Strauss Zelnick responded, "We haven't talked about a release date. So obviously we can't talk about the credibility of a release date that we haven't announced."Pushed further on whether the publisher is receiving consistent updates, the CEO deflected."We wouldn't talk publicly about the way we communicate with our teams internally," replied Zelnick. "We are blessed to be in business with the Rockstar folks and everyone knows that I feel that way. We have the best creative teams in the business across our company."Though the company did announce today that "consumer anticipation is phenomenal" for Borderlands 2, it would still need to hit home runs with NBA 2K13, XCOM: Enemy Unknown and BioShock: Infinite to hit its forecast.
Toshiba slips into the red as latest earnings reveal $153 million loss
Toshiba's most recent fiscal results (the first of its 2012 financial year) show that while the company pulled in $16 billion in turnover, it slumped to a $154 million loss for the last three months. While its "social infrastructure" unit (power plants, LED light bulbs and radiation detectors) generated a $107 million profit, the consumer electronics and white-goods sectors continued to lose sales. The company attributes the loss to further restructuring costs as well as pointing an accusatory digit toward the European financial crisis and concerns about power generation capacity in Japan. Despite the gloom, the company says that it still expects to hit a target of $81 billion turnover and $3.8 billion profit before March 2013.
Panasonic's 2013 Q1: things are looking up with a $164 million profit
Panasonic's financial year runs from summer to summer, so its first-quarter results for 2013 just hit the wire. The figures proudly show that the company has managed to turn around the losses it suffered so badly in the previous period -- with $23 billion in turnover generating a tidy profit of $164 million. While sales dropped by six percent compared to the first three months of the year, it's been reducing fixed costs and restructuring each segment of the business to ensure a return to profit making despite the worsening financial crisis in Europe. The company's even been able to stick some cash into the savings account, tucking $16.6 million into the piggy bank for a rainy day.
Capcom's quarterly earnings strong on Dragon's Dogma, social games
Capcom enjoyed a very robust first quarter, with a profit of ¥1.3 billion ($16.9 million) for the period ending June 30, which is up 290 percent from the same period last year. The company's digital content group (games!) made the majority of revenues during the quarter, with ¥13.74 billion ($176 million) in sales of the company's overall ¥18.62 billion ($238 million). That's up 79 and 56 percent from the same time last year, respectively.The company highlighted Dragon's Dogma as being part of the success. Despite having "struggled abroad," according to Capcom, the game's "popularity in the more profitable domestic market exceeded expectations by selling more than one million copies."The publisher also mentioned the continued strength of social games The Smurfs' Village and Snoopy's Street Fair, which have "brought Capcom steady fees." Minna to Monhan Card Master, Sengoku BASARA: Card Heroes and Resident Evil: Outbreak Survive were also mentioned as gaining Capcom 2 million new social network site users. Those new friends are sure to make all the other companies jealous.
Nintendo posts $220 million net loss for first quarter
Another year, another not-great first quarter for Nintendo. Although not as bad as last year's (and the year before's) net loss of ¥26 billion ($332M), the company still reported a loss of ¥17.23 billion ($220 million).Nintendo acknowledged 3DS sales had "only reached" 1.86 million for the quarter, hitting 19 million units sold in its lifetime. On the upside, the company isn't selling the hardware at a loss anymore."Compared to the quarter a year earlier, global sales of Nintendo 3DS hand-held game hardware increased 162 percent, while Nintendo 3DS software rose 63 percent," Nintendo noted. "In addition, the company announced that as of July 25, 2012, it was no longer selling Nintendo 3DS hardware below manufacturing costs."At this point, everyone is waiting to see how the Wii U performs when it launches later this year.
Huawei 1H 2012: profits dropped 22 percent, still made $1.37 billion
Huawei's financial figures for the first six months of 2012 reveal that the Chinese behemoth brought in turnover of 102.7 billion yuan ($16.08 billion), making a profit of 8.79 billion yuan ($1.37 billion). That's not exactly bad news, but the figure is 22 percent smaller than the same period last year -- leading the company to blame the drop on the global economy and saying that the telecoms business is a "significant challenge." It humbly bragged that it had deployed 38 of the 80 commercial LTE networks worldwide and that the upstart now held over 12 percent of the Chinese smartphone market. It also claimed that the Ascend P1 and Ascend D1 had become bestselling handsets in China, Western Europe, Japan, Australia and Canada -- which might have prompted CFO Ms. Meng Wanzhou to be "optimistic" about the company's performance in the second half of the year.
Rise and Shiny: Dragon Eternity
I have a fondness for War of Dragons, a sort of two-dimensional action-based MMO from Mail.Ru. When I looked at the game before, I enjoyed the design elements and artwork more than anything, but the grindy nature of the game basically turned me off. Still, there's something cool about a semi-graphical MMO that runs in a browser. So when I took a second, deeper look at Dragon Eternity, an MMO that resembles War of Dragons in many ways, I expected about the same outcome. I came out of this week with a bit more of an appreciation for both games mainly because I was able to see Dragon Eternity as what it is: a simple game that can become more complex with time. It's not exactly a "fun" game, but it's different.
Ubisoft sales up in last quarter thanks to Ghost Recon
Ubisoft sales for the first quarter of fiscal 2012-2013 (which ended June 30) are up 27.2 percent over the last year, coming in at €131 million ($160.6 million). The company attributes the better-than-expected performance to surprisingly high sales of Ghost Recon Future Soldier, indicating that Ubisoft didn't think to ask the title character about the future of his own game. In addition, digital distribution was a boon for Ubisoft, including free-to-play games and the phenomenon of Trials Evolution.For the second quarter, Ubisoft expects to come in short of last year's performance, because Driver: San Francisco did so well last year.
RIM announces Q1 earnings: $518 million net loss, 5,000 job cuts, BB10 not due until Q1 2013
The last quarter has been about as rough as they come for RIM, and it's now detailed just how things stacked up in terms of hard numbers. For the first quarter of its 2013 fiscal year, the company brought in $2.8 billion in revenue, down a full 33 percent from the prior quarter, while it reported a net loss of $518 million -- much worse than analysts were expecting. What's more, it's also announced that it's cutting an additional 5,000 jobs as part of its ongoing restructuring efforts, and that the first BlackBerry 10 smartphones now won't launch until sometime in the first quarter of the 2013 calendar year (that includes a QWERTY model launched in "close proximity" to the touchscreen-only device). As for why, RIM only went as far as to say that the integration of some key BlackBerry 10 features and the "associated large volume of code" has "proven to be more time consuming than anticipated." For his part, though, CEO Thorsten Heins says he remains "confident that the first BlackBerry 10 smartphones will provide a ground-breaking next generation smartphone user experience," and that he's "encouraged by the traction that the BlackBerry 10 platform is gaining with application developers and content partners." He further notes that the response to BB10 from key carrier partners has "been very positive." In terms of its existing devices, RIM reports that BlackBerry smartphone shipments (not sales) for the quarter totaled 7.8 million, while there were about 260,000 PlayBooks shipped -- on the company's earnings call, Heins noted that the total BlackBerry subscriber base now stands at 78 million. Not surprisingly, the company is warning of more bad news to come. It says it expects the "next several quarters to continue to be very challenging," with everything from the "increasing competitive environment," lower handset volumes, impact from the BlackBerry 10 delay, and the company's plans to "continue to aggressively drive sales of BlackBerry 7 handheld devices" expected to cut into its bottom line. In another bit of news, the company also announced that it has appointed Steve Zipperstein, Verizon's former General Counsel, as its new Chief Legal Officer. You can find the full earnings report at the source link below.
IDC: Nokia moved just 2.2 million Lumias this winter, but stay tuned
Although we know that Nokia had a wince-inducing first quarter, the company was hush hush on how many of its Windows Phone-packing Lumias had shipped out. We still don't have official word, but IDC estimates that Nokia delivered 2.2 million of the devices to shops (not necessarily to customers) between January and March. If the total is accurate, Lumias would represent less than a fifth of the 11.9 million smartphones shipped by Espoo over the season and wouldn't have Apple or Samsung quaking in their boots just yet. The research team is careful to warn that the spring and summer will be the real litmus tests: a healthy Lumia 900 launch in the US could easily spike that number. Our one certainty is that Nokia will still have to sell a lot of 808 PureViews if it wants to keep its smartphone sales humming in the short term.
Apple lords over tab market in Q1 2012, Samsung bumps Kindle in scuffle for scraps
If it's the end of a financial quarter, there must be another chronicle of the iPad swelling Apple's money pile and its tablet competitors trying in vain to chip off more for themselves. And with 11.8 million shipped by Cupertino out of 18.2 million slates total, that's pretty much the case -- with a minor shuffle of those "other guys" the only other tidbit. To wit, Amazon's Kindle petered into third spot only a quarter after trumpeting its ascension to number two, and Samsung displaced it as distant runner-up with sales of 1.1 million tabs. The most wide-eyed in the Korean maker's camp might point to Apple being topped in the rate of 3G / 4G tablets sold, but with eight times the sales of WiFi models, we doubt Apple's number-crunchers are losing any sleep over it. Per usual, the full report can be seen in the source link.
TiVo shows a Q1 net loss of $20.8 million, will launch TV Everywhere web portal soon
TiVo has released its financial results for Q1 2013, and right off the bat they show a wider than expected net loss of $20.8 million. This is despite a rise in revenue and subscribers (driven mostly by Virgin Media, which added 242,000), and the company expects another loss in the second quarter due to rising litigation costs in its ongoing cases against Motorola and Time Warner Cable. We've already heard about TiVo's new Stream placeshifting box, IP multiroom extender and six-tuner XG1 gateway, but the new product news is a plan to launch TV Everywhere streaming. The first cable operator joining in the new venture will be RCN, and TiVo says its portal will allow providers using its DVRs to deliver streaming video in or out of the home, with video on-demand and remote DVR scheduling on PCs, tablets and mobile devices. That's expected to launch later this year, but for all the details, numbers and quotes you can check the press releases after the break.
NVIDIA reports Q1 earnings: rakes $60.4 million profit on $924.9 million in revenue
What's black and white and red all over? One thing it's probably not is NVIDIA's Q1 2013 earnings report. That's why we're here to dig through the muck and tell you that the company saw both profits and revenue fall from last quarter. Revenue was down three percent to $924.9 million but, more shockingly, net income dropped 47.9 percent to just $60 million. With a slew of new product launches over the last few months NVIDIA is optimistic about the future and actually managed to beat Wall Street's expectations. Though it offers little explanation for the drop off in its earnings press release, we'd expect things to get back to normal soon. For all the fine financial details, check out the PR after the break.
DirecTV adds 81,000 subscribers during Q1 in the US, increases revenue by 12 percent
Unlike with Comcast, Wall Street experts weren't surprised by DirecTV's latest Q1 results -- in fact, they were quite disappointed. The satellite provider only managed to add 81,000 subscribers in the US of A during the quarter, which is more than a 50 percent decrease compared to last year's Q1 (184,000). Meanwhile, DirecTV did see a 12 percent increase in revenue, pushing the total to about $7.05 billion. That last bit thanks in large part to landing over 590,000 new customers in Latin America, though that didn't keep its current share price from dropping about 2.7 percent to $46.60. Nonetheless, DirecTV CEO, Mike White, says his company "delivered another strong quarter [..] highlighted by double-digit revenue, EPS and cash flow growth." Us? Well, we're wondering why those "roadside ditch" commercials aren't luring more Stateside folks away from cable...
IDC: Apple makes big gains in tablet market, Android stumbles
Research firm IDC predicted there would be a steep drop off in tablet shipments during Q1 of 2012. Following the surge of sales during the holiday season, a fall of 34 percent, while certainly staggering, is hardly surprising. But there's bad news: shipments failed to meet even those bleak predictions. Shipments fell by 38.4 percent, thanks in large part to Android slates stumbling dramatically. After a reasonably impressive holiday season, IDC expected Android would continue to make inroads in the market. Instead, the number of units moved dropped drastically, allowing Apple to not just maintain its position at the top of the heap, but assert an unquestionable dominance not seen since the early days of Honeycomb. After accounting for 54.7 percent of all tablet shipments in Q4 of 2011, the iPad opened up an impressive lead, claiming 68 percent of the market in Q1 of 2012. What's more, after catapulting to the number two spot by shipping 4.8 million units at the end of last year, Amazon fell to number three -- accounting for only 4 percent of tablets shipped, a precipitous fall from 16.8 percent last quarter. That's good news for Samsung, however, which reclaimed its place as first runner up slate wars. For more, check out the PR after the break.
Motorola Mobility loses $86 million in Q1, device shipments way down
Well, the first quarter of 2012 is officially over Motorola Mobility, and the financial news is rather sobering for the company. While revenues were up, the climb was modest, to just $3.1 billion. And that small bump in incoming cash was not enough to stave off another quarter of loses. In fact, after losing $80 million in Q4 of 2011, Moto lost $86 million in Q1 of 2012. The company continued to bleed cash in large part because shipments of mobile devices dropped off dramatically. Only 8.9 million devices were shipped in the quarter, down from 10.5 million in the last part of 2011. With 5.1 million of those being smartphones however, the phone division did manage to increase revenues by three percent. The one bright spot was the home segment which, thanks to its home gateways and broadcast goods, managed to make (that's right, not lose) $68 million, up from $53 million a year ago. For more numbers and charts check out the source link.
IDC crowns Samsung the biggest phone maker by shipments for Q1 2012
Research firm IDC is reporting that Nokia has been dethroned as the world's biggest phone maker by Samsung. In the first quarter of the year, Samsung shipped 98.3 million mobile phones, with Nokia and Apple in second and third place. In the smartphone-only charts, the Korean company shipped 42.2 million of its Android and Windows Phone handsets, while Cupertino shipped 35.1 million and Nokia shipped a paltry-by-comparison 11.9 million. Samsung, Apple and companies outside the top 5 all made big gains in the smartphone space, while Nokia, RIM and HTC all felt their numbers drop. Unsurprisingly, companies with big stakes in dumb phones suffered, with Nokia and LG losing big chunks of their market share to the big two and stalking horse ZTE, which has bested LG for fourth place. After the break, we've got the official tallies that you can pore over.
