SEGA vuelve a presentar un beneficio astronómico trimestral

SEGA escribió:Sega-Sammy earnings figures for April-December 2010 have just arrived. The company earned 310.1b Yen ($3.80b) in revenue for the period, profiting 36.82b Yen which is $451.5m. In the prior nine month period to December, Sega-Sammy had generated revenues of 285.3b Yen ($3.50b) and profited only 16.9b Yen ($207.4m). For the full year to March 2011, Sega-Sammy expects revenue to reach 410b Yen ($5.03b) with profits forecast to reach 37.5b Yen ($460.1m). Both figures are forecast up from the year to March 2010. Revenue is expected to be up 6.6% and profit is expected to be up 85.6% in the March 2011 year. Despite the positive gains, Sega's video game business is actually trending downward. Revenue from video game software is expected to fall 23% to 94b Yen ($1.153b). Profit from video games is forecast to fall to 6b Yen ($73.6m) from 6.3b Yen in the prior fiscal year. Sega's profit is mostly from its not video game businesses - particularly pachislot machines.

Much of the reason for the decline in video game revenue can be tied to video game unit sales. Sega shipped 26.75m games in the March 2010 year, but only expects to ship 16m. In April-December 2009, Sega shipped 16.73m games, but in April-December 2010 the company only shipped 13.63m. Without any major hits for the final quarter of the March 2011 year, Sega's anticipated software drop off looks accurate, if slightly conservative. Sega's main issue in the current year is that European software shipments fell from 8.16m units to 5.95m units from April-December 2009 to April-December 2010. American software fell from only 6.09m units to 5.77m units in the same time frame, while Japanese / Asian software fell from 2.47m units to 1.90m units.

Sega also indicated its major hits for the nine months to December 2010 as well as software shipments by platform. The major hits were Sonic Colors for Wii & DS, which shipped 1.85m units, Vanquish for X360 and PS3 which shipped 850,000 units, and Football Manager 2011 which shipped 620,000 units for PC and PSP. Shining Hearts also is cited as performing well in Japan for PSP.

For April-December 2010, Sega shipped 1.42m Wii games, down from 4.65m over the same period of 2009, primarily in the absence of a new Mario & Sonic game for 2010. PS3 game shipments were 1.13m in April-December 2010 and 1.12m in the last nine months of 2009. X360 game shipments nearly doubled from 790,000 in Apr-Dec 2009 to 1.48m in Apr-Dec 2010. DS game shipments dropped from 3.13m in the last months of 2009 to 1.34m in late 2010 also due to the Mario & Sonic issue. Sega's PSP games shipments grew from 1.07m in the last three quarters of 2009 to 1.44m over that period of 2010. PC software sales increased by about 20%, from 730,000 to 870,000 units over the aforementioned time frames.

Based on the figures above, Sonic Colors was over 2/3 of the Sega's Wii and DS software shipments from April-December 2010. Vanquish was 29% of Sega's X360 and PS3 software for the same period. These figures show Sega's video game business has become increasingly hit based of late, so it will be interesting to see how 3DS and NGP are to be supported, especially since the Mario & Sonic franchise is roughly half of Sega's sales on Wii to date.

Catalogue software, presumably older Sega games re-released on various services grew from 5.21m to 5.91m units. It is also possible catalogue figures may include Sonic the Hedgehog 4, which did rather well on Iphone, WiIWare, PSN, and XBLA.