A - Warren Jenson
Analyst · Deutsche Bank
Jeetil, let me take the question in light of margin and others can jump in. When we look at margin, where we will be focused in terms of building our operating margins is really in the following areas. First of all, I think you have to look to how the consoles do in the years ahead, and where we feel good is the technology that we’re seeing in the marketplace today with the 360, it’s online capabilities and the things you can do just from a game play standpoint, I think, are terrific and have been well received by the consumer. We would expect nothing less than that from the PlayStation 3 coming out, and I think when you first look at things like tie ratios and volume of consoles that will ultimately get into the marketplace, we would see that as a net positive in terms of building operating leverage. The second thing will be up to how the marketplace determines, and that will be price. I think the good news on the price side is over time, and Frank can jump in here, too, but I think you’re going to see more of an ARPU model follow on to the packaged goods sales and that will be things like the in-game advertising, it will be things like micro transactions. I think you’ll also see a steady increase in revenue from digital downloads, because that will become much more prevalent over the coming years. All of those hopefully will be good things. Third, we’re focused on new IP. So, the more we can own, the more intellectual property in our portfolio without royalty rates, the higher our gross margins will be. And then, finally, before I stop on the point, the other thing that we are focused on doing and we’re going to have to prove out that we can deliver is scaling our infrastructure. We’ve made significant investments in RenderWare in our studio in order to drive capacity into the system over time. Whether we’re talking about our R&D, our marketing/sales organization, or our G&A, we are looking as an organization for ways to scale that operating infrastructure that we have. Those are, a few of the factors that come into play in driving margin. On the acquisitions side, our screen, we’ve gone through before, it’s pretty stringent. It’s got to strategically make sense, has to culturally fit and also hit our financial hurdles. And to the extent there are opportunities out there, we will take advantage of those opportunities. It’s worked well in the past for the company, and we suspect that will be part of our business going forward just as it has been historically.