Ubi Attains Top Four Position News
Jon Wilcox
28/06/2006
The French publisher confirms its global position (excluding Japan) as Guillemot announces their financial results...
Ubisoft has today confirmed that it is now the fourth largest independent publisher of videogames in the world...excluding Japan. News of the company's position comes on the same day that Ubisoft confirmed its financial results for the 2005/2006 fiscal year, which ended on March 31st 2006.
Despite net sales for the year increasing by just under Eu15 million (£10.4 million) from Eu532.5 million (£368.0 million) in the previous fiscal year to Eu547.1 million (£378.0 million), both the company's current operating income and net income dropped quite substantially in comparison. Net income fell from Eu24.7 (£17.1 million) in 2004/05 to Eu11.9 (£8.2 million), whilst current operating income took a nosedive from Eu33.5 (£23.1 million) to Eu0.4 million (£0.27 million).
Despite such figures, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot remained upbeat:
"Ubisoft has achieved a solid performance during this fiscal year, gaining new market shares and increasing its sales in spite of the 3% decline in the video game sector. Thanks to our R&D efforts and our early positioning on new generation consoles, we have already achieved almost 30% of our sales from next generation in fiscal year 2005-2006 and in the fourth quarter, we attained 20% of market share on the Xbox 360TM. 2005-2006 was also marked by the success of the game Peter Jackson's King-Kong : The official Game of the Movie, which enabled us to jump into the film licensing market with 4.5 million units sold. Finally, during this period of high investment, Ubisoft has continued to improve its financial position and can therefore accelerate its growth and pursue its development."
Guillemot continued, "2006-2007 will be a new year of transition with the arrival of Sony's PS3 and Nintendo's WII consoles. We forecast a sales growth of between 5% and 10%, despite a global market which should decrease by 7%, thanks to the launch of 5 new high-potential brands."
Looking towards the future of the firm, the Ubisoft boss announced that he expected the company to achieve Eu60 million (£41.4 million) in sales in the first quarter of 2006/07, which ends at the end of the week on June 30th. The figure would represent an increase of around Eu17 million (£11.7 million) compared to the same period in the 2005/06 fiscal year.
Beyond that, Guillemot stated that "2007-2008 will be a year of strong recovery for the sector and we should once again outperform the market, whose growth is expected to approach 17% for the year. The investments made in the last two years will enable us to launch 5 new brands and new Hollywood licenses. In this context, the pre-tax operating profit before stock options should show a very strong improvement...We will pursue our offensive strategy of investment in new consoles in order to continue to grow faster than the market thanks to the creation of new brands and to our entry into new games segments. We will thus be able to take full advantage of the strong upturn in the sector predicted for 2007-2008 onwards".
We'll have further news on Ubisoft shortly...