- Electronic Arts reported its fiscal year 2020 earnings, with a net income of $3.04B USD for the last twelve months and a profit of $418M for its fiscal year 2020 fourth quarter.
- Almost 80% of the company’s revenues came from digital sales. Overall, EA generated $5.54B in revenues for the full fiscal year and revenues of $1.39B for the quarter ended March 31.
- Over the last twelve months, EA repurchased a total of 12.3M of its own shares for an aggregated sum of $1.21B.
Yesterday, Electronic Arts (EA), a video game developer of titles such as Apex Legends and the EA Sports series, reported its earnings for the fourth quarter of its fiscal year 2020, which ended March 31. The developer and publisher recorded an increase in net revenues to $1.39B from $1.24B in the same period last year. During the full fiscal year 2020 EA generated net revenues of $5.54B, up % from $4.95B in FY 2019.
Image credit: EA, Q4 2020 Financial Earnings Report
While many of EA’s games are available on PC or mobile, the developer generates most of its revenues from console sales. For its 2020 fiscal year fourth quarter, EA recorded digital net bookings (which is calculated by adding total digital net revenues to the change in deferred net revenues for online and mobile game fees) of $707M, which accounts for over 63% of the company’s total digital net bookings. For the full fiscal year 2020, the share of console net bookings is even slightly higher at roughly 64.7%. Digital net bookings represented 78% of total net bookings for the fiscal year, which is up 9% year-over-year. As digital revenues are accounting for most of the company’s revenues, the slump in physical game retail sales due to COVID-19 policies didn’t impact the company’s results significantly.
In its earnings call, EA highlighted several milestones for its game metrics, including FIFA 20 reaching more than 25M unique players, Madden NFL 20 achieving the highest engagement levels in the franchise history, and Apex Legends becoming the most downloaded free-to-play game on PlayStation 4 (PS4) in 2019. During the call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said that “with more people staying at home in the fourth quarter, we did see rising usage and engagement levels in many of our games.“
In total, EA generated a net income of $418M or $1.44 per share for its FY 2020 Q4, which is an increase of 100% compared to $209M in the same period of FY 2019. For the full fiscal year, the company recorded a net income of $3.04B, up 198% from $1.02B in the previous year.
The company used parts of its profits to repurchase 12.3M of its own shares for an aggregated sum of $1.21B during the last twelve months as part of its $2.4B share repurchase program initiated in May 2018. In its fiscal year 2020 Q4, EA repurchased 2.7M of those for $291M.
