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Learning From EA's Annual Report
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."
You can also get any company's public filing through EDGAR, which is put in a standardized format, in plain old HTML.
EA's 2009 10-K
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.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.