EA's mobile and DS sales plateau while PSP sales collapse

It's not a good time to be the financial controller of a large global company and while game publishers haven't been hit as badly as car makers or bankers, the news as we enter the period for end of financial year announcements isn't expected to be good.

Certainly EA hasn't been having a good time of it recently, and despite only being a relatively small part of its overall operations, the performance of its games on DS or PSP as detailed in its preliminary report for Fiscal Year 2009 haven't helped much either.

Compared to the same period last year, PSP sales during the three months ending 31st March 2009 (Q4), fell 39 percent to $44 million while DS sales were exactly the same at $38 million.

Over the entire 12-month financial year, PSP total game sales were $174 million and total DS sales $221 million. In contrast total mobile sales were $189 million. These figures relate to 4 percent, 5 percent and 4 percent of EA's total sales respectively, or 13 percent overall.

In fact, of its defined "Total Mobile" category, EA Mobile was by far the standout performer with the annual total of $189 million up 24 percent year-on-year. Its Q4 figure of $49 million was also up year-on-year by 20 percent. However the Q4 revenue for FY08-09 was the same as Q3, suggesting mobile sales growth is stagnating.

More generally, EA's total GAAP net revenue across the entire business for the financial year was up 15 percent to $4.2 billion compared to FY08. Non-GAAP revenue was up 2 percent to $4.1 billion.

(The difference between GAAP and non-GAAP is non-GAAP is used to strip out one-off costs to try and make year-on-year comparisons easier.)

Problematically though, the company made an overall loss for the year by either accounting measure. The GAAP net loss for the year was $1.1 billion as compared with a net loss of $454 million for the prior year. Non-GAAP net loss was $96 million as compared with net income of $339 million a year ago.

And perhaps more significant in terms of the company's exposure to the wider economic situation was the collapse in trailing-twelve-month operating cash flow from $338 million in FY08 to a mere $12 million.

Still EA's warchest contains $2.2 billion in cash and other liquid investments so it's not going bust anytime soon.