SEGA Sammy Halves Its Losses For Fiscal '09 News

SEGA Sammy is reporting net losses of 23 billion yen (£158 million) for the fiscal year ending 31st March 2009, which more than halves its losses for the previous year of 52 billion yen (£362 million).

Despite these improvements, the company is actually reporting slightly lower revenues for fiscal '09, with net sales figures coming in at 429 billion yen (£2.96 billion) compared to 459 billion yen (£3.17 billion) for the previous year.

Factors associated with SEGA Sammy's losses for fiscal '09 were, "downward pressure on corporate earnings due to sharp foreign exchange fluctuations, a worsening employment situation and depressed personal consumption," according to the company's earnings report.

Many other Japanese companies, such as Sony, have suffered heavy losses on product exports over the last year due to Japan's strong yen, with SEGA Sammy now reporting foreign exchange losses of just over 1 billion yen (£7.3 million) for fiscal 2009.

Additionally, SEGA Sammy also posted heavy losses of 3.47 billion yen (£24 million) for the cancellation of game projects that it had under development. We can't recall any big SEGA projects that got canned since April 2008, so perhaps the project(s) in question hadn't been announced yet.

Predictions for the next financial year are optimistic, with SEGA Sammy aiming for full year profits of 15 billion yen (£103 million) over initial losses of 14.5 billion yen (£100 million) for the first six months of the year up to September 30th 2009. Predicted net sales figures for the 2010 fiscal year are 420 billion yen (£2.89 billion).

As far as individual game sales are concerned for the SEGA Corporation, SEGA Sammy noted "favourable year-end sales" for Sonic Unleashed and Football Manager 2009, as well as continued strong sales figures for Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games.

Phantasy Star Portable and Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 (a.k.a. Yakuza 3) have reportedly sold well for the company in Japan, although SEGA Sammy reported that "other titles performed weakly".

Total game sales by territory were as follows:

• Europe - 12.73 million units
• United States - 12.49 million units
• Japan - 4.23 million
• Total: 29.47 million

SEGA Sammy is predicting game sales for fiscal 2010 as follows:

• Europe - 14.5 million
• United States - 11.63 million
• Japan - 3.57 million
• Total: 29.7 million

Theses figures clearly suggest that SEGA sees Europe as its key territory strategically, although the SEGA Sammy group did note that it "will work to raise business efficiency by narrowing down the number of titles handled," during the current financial year.

Finally, we dug-out an interesting titbit of info regarding alterations to SEGA's retirement policies, with the earnings report noting that "SEGA Corporation implemented an early retirement program with the aim of optimising personnel numbers to suit its current level of earnings."

That might explain Yu Suzuki's officially announced retirement on April 1st of this year then, as the legendary developer is only 50 years old. It begs the question: exactly how much did Suzuki want to leave his post at SEGA?