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."

Comments

Summary links to wrong report

[game kid]

GamePolitics links the correct report at their article; Slashdot's summary links the 2008 report in "annual report" instead. (EA only has reports to 2008 at the "annual report" link in the Firehose version.)

Re:Summary links to wrong report

[Solarhands]

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.

Re:What exactly are we supposed to learn?

[Norsefire]

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?

[ta bu shi da yu]

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.

Re:What exactly are we supposed to learn?

[N1AK]

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.

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.

Re:What exactly are we supposed to learn?

[JamesP]

Where's the 'being eaten by a grue' risk, I don't see it...