Infogrames Announces Decreased Revenue, Increased Profit

Author: by Nich Maragos, Simon Carless

Infogrames, the French-headquartered parent company of Atari, has announced unaudited revenue of 624.2 million euros ($793 million USD) for the year ended March 31, 2005, down from 700.8 million ($890 million USD) for the 12 month period ended March 31, 2004, a drop analysts attributed to fewer software releases by Atari and the hardware shortage during the holiday season. The company's expected operating profit will be around 20 million euros ($25.7 million USD), which will just barely place it within its target range of 20 million to 30 million euros for the year. Though the total may not quite reach expectations, it will nevertheless exceed the 2.6 million euros ($3.3 million USD) of operating profit generated in the 2003/2004 year. The company singled out sales of Dragon Ball Z games as a particular highlight, topping 5 million for the license's Infogrames-published lifetime, and also mentioned that more than 4 million games were sold under the Driver franchise, although there have been few recent SKUs in this series. In addition, the company mentioned that over its lifetime, RollerCoaster Tycoon games sold more than one and a half million copies. However, the company has seen some notable franchise losses in the past few months, with Civilization's sales to Take-Two and an extended agreement between Sid Meier and 2K Games, as well as Midway's deal with Epic regarding the next set of Unreal games, formerly published by Atari. The company's long-term debt also continues to worry some observers - however, Infogrames announced that it has reduced its debt from 313.3 million euros ($397.9 USD) to under 200 million euros over the course of the 2004/5 year. It still has 26 million euros left to repay in July on the current debt reduction schedule, but Infogrames CEO Bruno Bonnell commented: "There is no risk regarding the repayment of the 26 million euros in July." Going forward, the company is showing a number of games at E3, including The Matrix: Path of Neo for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and PC, and Test Drive Unlimited for what is only described as "next-generation consoles".