Earnings Labs

Electronic Arts Inc. (EA)

Q1 2017 Earnings Call· Tue, Aug 2, 2016

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

And good afternoon. My name is Jennifer and I will be the conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Electronic Arts First Quarter 2017 Earnings Call. All lines been placed on the to prevent background noise. After the speaker's remarks there will be a question-and-answer session. Thank you. And now I would like to turn the call over to Chris Evenden, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

Chris Evenden - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Thank you, Jennifer. Welcome to EA's fiscal 2017 first quarter earnings call. With me on the call today are Andrew Wilson, our CEO; Blake Jorgensen, our CFO; and Ken Barker, our Chief Accounting Officer. Please note that our SEC filings and our earnings release are available at, ir.ea.com. In addition, we have posted earnings sides to accompany our prepared remarks. Lastly, after the call we will post our prepared remarks, an audio replay of the call and a transcript. One quick note on upcoming events. Our Q2 earnings call is scheduled for Tuesday, November 1. This presentation does contain forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of the company. Actual events and results may differ materially from our expectations. We refer you to our most recent Form 10-K for a discussion of risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed today. Electronic Arts makes these statements as of today, August 2, 2016, and disclaims any duty to update them. We will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial metrics during this call. However, as discussed on our July 19 conference call, in light of the new interpretations issued by the SEC on May 17, this will be the last call in which we disclose any non-GAAP measures that adjust for deferred revenue. Our earnings release and the earnings slides provide a reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP measures. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be considered in isolation from or as a substitution for or superior to our GAAP results. We encourage investors to consider all measures before making an investment decision. All comparisons made in the course of this call are against the same period in the prior year unless otherwise stated. Now I'll turn the call over to Andrew. Andrew P.…

Operator

Operator

And our first question comes from Stephen Ju with Credit Suisse.

Stephen Ju - Credit Suisse

Analyst · Credit Suisse

Okay. Thanks. Just wondering if you can share anything about NBA this year and what will change versus years past and whether you think launching off-calendar will meaningfully impact its prospects? And secondarily, is the Q4 launch of NBA, is that going to be the rule of thumb on a go-forward basis, or will you look to get this back on the calendar? Thanks. Andrew P. Wilson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: So first off, as we think about NBA and we think about captivating a global fan base with NBA, we're very, very excited about what we just launched with NBA Live on mobile. As we said in the prepared remarks, it quickly went to number one in the free downloads and it's been performing extremely well. Engagement is high and better in terms of metrics across the board than we could've expected and better in terms of metrics than many of our other sports games so far. So that leads us to believe that we have an exciting opportunity with NBA and an exciting opportunity with sports on mobile all together. The broader NBA plans, we don't have anything more to announce right now other than the team continues to work diligently on ensuring that we are delivering great NBA experiences on any and all devices that fans want to play on. And we believe that, as we are able to announce more around our plans, that it will be very exciting for fans across all devices.

Stephen Ju - Credit Suisse

Analyst · Credit Suisse

Thank you. Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Next question?

Operator

Operator

And our next question is from Justin Post with Merrill Lynch. Justin Post - Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc.: Thank you. Can you help us at all with your Battlefield expectations in your guidance and whether you've changed those at all post E3? And then you are buying back quite a bit of stock, but you have a lot of SBC. Now that you're going to GAAP, do you think you can lower SBC? And as you do buybacks, do you think you can really lower that share count over time? Thank you. Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, let me hit both of those, Justin. First, we were very pleased at the reaction of players at our EA Play. I think you got a chance to play it yourself. It's been very, very popular, and the feedback has been extremely strong. We tend not to try to raise guidance too early in the year. We would like to see a little more demand metrics on all of our products, particularly Battlefield and Titanfall, before we make that decision. Gamescom is a very important beat that's coming up in a couple of weeks in Europe, and then obviously the potential for betas around those products will help us derive better demand metrics. Last year, if you remember, we did raise guidance coming out of the first quarter because our initial forecast on Battlefront, the Star Wars title, was relatively low, and we moved that up. We've got a fairly normal forecast for Battlefield and Titanfall, so we're not moving those yet, but we're still super optimistic about the titles. I'm very excited. So, more to come in the future. But we felt it was just too early in the year to try to move guidance on any of the titles going forward. On the share count piece, we have been over time bringing down stock-based compensation. With an important part of the overall compensation, we feel it's important as part of our employees and executives to bear some of the risks of the stockholders. And having your compensation as part of that is critical. But we also recognize that we need to bring all compensation down over time to continue to be profitable as a company. We balance that with the requirements of attracting the greatest people that we can in the industry, and we feel like that mix is a pretty good mix today. But we will obviously be trying to drive down the share count between a combination of managing aggressive buybacks as well as prudent management of our overall compensation pool. Justin Post - Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith, Inc.: Okay. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question is from Colin Sebastian with Robert W. Baird. Colin A. Sebastian - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Great. Thank you. I wonder if you could describe overall trends with (28:29-28:37)... Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Okay, Colin? Colin A. Sebastian - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Yeah? Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Colin, we're having a hard time hearing you. Colin A. Sebastian - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): Can you hear me now? Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah. Colin A. Sebastian - Robert W. Baird & Co., Inc. (Broker): The first question was describing trends you're seeing in attach rates for catalog titles, and that's just as a measure of the progress of comps in the cycle. And then secondly, I was hoping for just a clarification or update on the multi-year framework for revenue growth that you laid out at the Analyst Day. I believe you initially indicated an incremental $1 billion in revenue over two to three years. I wonder if you look through the pipeline and the progress you're making, how much of that potential there could be to that framework. Thank you. Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Sure. So on attach rates, we're continuing to be excited about the growth of the overall console business. And I think the plans that were announced at E3 around both Xbox and PlayStation were viewed in the industry as very positive. I think moving beyond the notion of – or jumping into the compatibility issue head-on and trying to stop the notion of having consoles that are not compatible will help the software side…

Operator

Operator

Your next question is from Drew Crum with Stifel. Drew Crum - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Okay. Thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. I wonder if you guys could comment on the timing of FIFA Mobile, what your expectations are. And I believe your guidance for mobile for the year was 15%. I know that's on a non-GAAP basis, but it looks like you're off to a very good start for fiscal 2017. Any update on expectations for mobile as a whole? Thanks. Andrew P. Wilson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: So I'll take that. Thanks, Drew. So a couple of things. One is, mobile is going strong for us. We're seeing growth in the mobile market that is outpacing some of our early expectations for the broader industry. Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes continues to perform well. Madden NFL continues to perform well, even in the off-season. And with the football season just around the corner, we expect that that will once again ramp. Our broader catalog of SimCity and The Sims and Need for Speed and Real Racing also continue to perform very well. As I said earlier, we just launched NBA Live Mobile. We launched that well in advance of the season to ensure a good and strong ramp both of the game design, the architecture and the infrastructure. And with a lot of basketball happening still with the summer season and a certain competitive sports event going on in Rio over the next couple of weeks, we believe it's a great opportunity to start to ramp our NBA business on mobile, and it's performing extremely well. And follows a similar design and modality of play to what we have learned – engages fans to the highest degree around Madden. As we've talked about before, we're also looking to do that with FIFA. And as with all of our sports games, we typically launch them at the outset or early in the season. And right now we're on track to launch our FIFA mobile property early in the European football season, which would align perfectly with the ramp of the fan base at that time. Drew Crum - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Okay. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Operator

Your next question is from Brian Pitz with Jefferies.

Brian J. Pitz - Jefferies LLC

Analyst · Jefferies

Thanks for the questions. On Madden, with unique players up 20% and mobile players up 25%, can you discuss what is driving this user growth and what role Ultimate Team is actually playing here? And then on mobile, with Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes at the top of the charts, just wondering if you could comment on monetization on a per-user basis relative to other EA mobile titles. And looking at that averaged 2.5 hours per day of playtime, what's the durability of a game like that? Thanks. Andrew P. Wilson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: I'll grab the first half and I'll let Blake take the second half. As it relates to our broader Madden community, again, the fan base of the NFL continues to grow. It's a great league. It's a sport that's very, very important to the population of North America and even growing internationally right now in Europe and Mexico and other parts of the world. Our Madden development teams have been very, very focused on a couple of vectors over the last couple of years. And you've seen this kind of manifest in both console and mobile as we've come forward. The first is about how do we bring on new players and then how do we keep players engaged over time. And, of course, quality is at the very core of that, but on-boarding, user interface, tutorials, training, things that really ignite the passion for new players and get them into the Madden community and playing and competing for the love of the sport as well as providing ongoing innovation and live services and ongoing community-based events that keeps our long-term fans and our long-time fans more deeply engaged. You're going to continue to see this across both Madden and our sports games…

Brian J. Pitz - Jefferies LLC

Analyst · Jefferies

Great. Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Chris Merwin with Barclays.

Christopher David Merwin - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst · Barclays

All right. Great. Thank you. I just had a couple, and apologies if this was covered. Just in terms of the Player Network, I was just trying to get a sense of where you are in rolling that out, and to what extent we actually saw the benefit of that in the Ultimate Team result that you delivered this quarter? And then should we see maybe even more of an impact later in the year as it relates to your marketing costs as you roll out the big first-person shooters? And then just a second question on the mobile business; just wondering if there's any impact that you saw from Pokémon GO in the quarter. Augmented reality turned out to be this huge mass market feature that people really like. So do you have any plans to integrate augmented reality into your mobile games? Thanks. Andrew P. Wilson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Okay. So on the Player Network, you're going to hear a lot more about this from us. As we look to the future, as we think about where games are going, we see some fundamental problems arising if you are a gamer. So in a world where gamers are playing more games across more devices through more business models in more geographies than ever before, the concept as a player of always being able to stay connected to your friends and always being able to stay connected to the games you love, irrespective of what device you play on, is going to be an important problem to solve. We believe that the investment that we've been making, our core digital platform, with an ID that travels with you across devices with a single data infrastructure that allows us to always understand the full 360-degree view of…

Christopher David Merwin - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Analyst · Barclays

All right. Great. Thank you. Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Next question?

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Eric Sheridan with UBS.

Eric J. Sheridan - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst · UBS

Thanks for taking the questions. Maybe one big picture and one on the Star Wars franchise. Big picture question, Andrew. Would love your thoughts on how we should be thinking about the publisher community and how it's going to approach the console upgrade or mid-cycle console upgrade cycle, however you'd like to frame it, that we're going to see from Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo over the next 12 months, plus or minus, how you're preparing for that, what that might mean in terms of going to market, making consumers aware of your titles and managing through that transition. And then on Star Wars, we saw the announcement at Star Wars Celebration. It looked as if the expansion pack this year is going to be more tightly intertwined with the actual movie content that comes out in December. What might that mean for the breadth of the platform going forward as well as maybe even marketing efficiencies, since the content could be so tied closely with the movie? Thanks, guys. Andrew P. Wilson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: So on the first question, at a macro level, we're excited about what Sony and Microsoft have announced. The reality for us is, again, in a networked world, liquidity of players is really, really important. And what we've seen over the last decade or more with respect to PC gamers is that community has continued to grow and it has grown a world where the hardware refresh cycle has been disconnected from the software refresh cycle. And what that's meant is that irrespective of what kind of device you have within kind of a seven to 10-year timeframe, you're able to play with a much, much bigger global community. What we see now with the things that have been talked about…

Chris Evenden - Vice President-Investor Relations

Management

Next question?

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Mike Olson with Piper Jaffray. Mike J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co. (Broker): Hey, everybody. I had two question. You mentioned earlier that you haven't changed your assumptions that are built into guidance for Battlefield 1 and Titanfall 2. I don't recall if you provided what kind of unit expectations you have for those titles. Is that something that you would be willing to share or share again if you have already talked about it? And then secondly, do you anticipate any Olympics-related distraction that could impact player engagement over the next month or so? Have you ever seen anything from Olympics in the past? Thanks. Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: So on the guidance, we've talked rough numbers with people. We've told people that typically a Battlefield title does about 15 million in a year. Our guidance is slightly under that. And we hope that that excitement builds and it will clearly go through that number. But for right now, it's slightly under that number. And Titanfall did a little more than 7 million units last time. It was early in the cycle and one of the few titles out there. We think it'll do more than that, but it's probably closer to 10 million than it is to 15 million as built into our guidance. So closer to 9 million to 10 million on Titanfall and just under 15 million on Battlefield 1. In terms of the Olympics, Andrew can probably jump in here. But I think oftentimes, if there are sports going on that we have games associated with, there's a lot of positive. As you see with the FIFA Ultimate Team, numbers relative to the Euro and the Copa America. We didn't have programs directly linked to those, but people engage in those because their favorite players are playing on new teams or in new tournaments and that drives them in. So I think in general, athletics bring people back to athletics. If they're watching on TV, they're oftentimes going to try to imitate that somewhere else and that may benefit some of our games. Mike J. Olson - Piper Jaffray & Co. (Broker): Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Eric Handler with MKM Partners.

Eric O. Handler - MKM Partners LLC

Analyst · MKM Partners

Thanks a lot for taking my question. Just looking at your extra content free-to-play line in digital, obviously your biggest segment within digital, growth in 1Q was just a little more than 1%. That's your slowest growth quarter I think ever since you started putting out those metrics. Was there anything specific that – was it timing of just the releases that drove that number so below average? Or was there something unique there? And how do you see that playing out over the rest of the year? Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, so you're referring to growth in extra content? Is that what you're saying?

Eric O. Handler - MKM Partners LLC

Analyst · MKM Partners

Yes, Blake. Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yeah, so growth in extra content is really masked by the fact that we last year in the quarter had a $30 million deferral of...

Eric O. Handler - MKM Partners LLC

Analyst · MKM Partners

Oh, that's right. Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: FIFA Online 3 revenue that popped all in Q3. So if you take that out, you saw strong growth in extra content. Clearly, if you look at the underlying growth of Ultimate Team, you're continuing to see extremely strong growth in Ultimate Team led by FIFA across the full Ultimate Team spectrum. And so we are pretty confident that our guidance for the full year of 10% growth of extra content will be on track and we should easily be able to see that over time. Similar dynamic and full game downloads, it was flat year-over-year. But almost all of that flat was driven by the fact that in Q1 last year, we had a huge amount of sales on Battlefield Hardline, a very large title. We didn't have a similar large title. Obviously we had one title in the quarter, Mirror's Edge, but a much smaller title than the comparison as Battlefield Hardline last year. So we're very confident that the digital growth is continuing and just cautioning people to always make sure they look at drivers of the underlying – understand the underlying component.

Eric O. Handler - MKM Partners LLC

Analyst · MKM Partners

Much appreciated, Blake. Thanks. Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Thanks.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Ben Schachter with Macquarie. Benjamin Schachter - Macquarie Capital (USA), Inc.: Hey, guys. A few questions. First, just broadly on retail. As you move to more digital full game downloads, can you just broadly discuss how it's impacting relationships with the key retailers, how that will evolve over time? And then secondly, PlayStation VR likely to first (49:47) more mass market VR product to come to market? What is that going mean for the industry overall? Obviously, it's going to be pretty small numbers this year, likely (49:57). But does the interest in that mean anything for the industry broadly? And then finally, on the U.K., historically first-person shooters have actually been geared very much to the U.K. and U.S. With all the issues that are going on in the U.K., do you think that's going impact anything at all for Titanfall and Battlefield and potentially FIFA? Thanks. Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: So why don't I just hit the piece on the U.K. real quick. So we're hedged through – out 18 months. Those hedges are not 100% each quarter, as they decline over time, but we're well hedged for the rest of this year, so we don't see more FX headwind that would impact the sales of FIFA or Battlefield or Titanfall. We also don't see any changes in the Brexit driving changing in people's desire to play video games. So we don't see an impact there. Do you want to touch on the VR piece? Andrew P. Wilson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yeah, so on PlayStation VR, again, we're very excited about this. I think to your point, given its price point and modality of play, it's one of the more accessible forms of…

Operator

Operator

And your next question comes from Mike Hickey with The Benchmark Company.

Michael Hickey - The Benchmark Co. LLC

Analyst · The Benchmark Company

Hey, Andrew and Blake. Great quarter, guys. Thanks for squeezing me in the question-and-answer here. I'm curious – two questions, one on FIFA 17 on the Story Mode, who the incremental player is there that you think will show up and if you fear at all there could be any sort of pressure on Ultimate Team and I guess Story Mode cannibalizing Ultimate Team to some level? And second question, any visibility on fiscal 2018? At least on the surface – obviously we're Q1 2017, so it's quite a ways away, but on the surface it looks like the environment could be a bit challenging at least in driving sales growth and how you think about maybe M&A as a potential driver for fiscal 2018 growth? Thanks, guys. Andrew P. Wilson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Let me touch on the FIFA piece, and then I'll let Blake take on FY 2018. As we think about our global community of gamers, again, FIFA is one of the biggest games on the planet. It attracts a very diverse playing population: old, young, male, female, east, west. And we are always looking at delivering new and innovative experiences for our FIFA players. We still expect that FIFA Ultimate Team will be the most engaging mode in the game. Year-on-year our players tell us that it's the most exciting way to play FIFA and the most interesting way and fulfills their fantasy of really building the ultimate team and taking that team and competing with their friends. But with that said, we also understand that as a new player coming into FIFA that may be a little daunting. And so we see Story Mode as not just a new way for existing fans to play, but actually a great on-boarding mode. Again,…

Michael Hickey - The Benchmark Co. LLC

Analyst · The Benchmark Company

Thanks, guys.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Neil Doshi with Mizuho.

Neil A. Doshi - Mizuho Securities USA, Inc.

Analyst · Mizuho

Great. Thanks, guys. Given the increasing engagement on the mobile side as well as on the console side, have you guys thought about getting more aggressive in terms of advertising as a way to get players to pay more as well as to play more? And then on the international side, it looks like international as a percent of revenue jumped to about 59%. It's been higher than it has been in the past couple of quarters. Any color in terms of titles and/or regions that drove that growth? Thanks. Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: So on mobile advertising, we do a little under $100 million in mobile advertising. We try to steer – we try to do a couple things. We try to keep people in our networks, so steer them to other games in our network, which is powerful. That doesn't make us money, it just keeps people in the network. And, two, the next piece is we might tend to show people advertising if they're not monetizing in other ways. What I will tell you is because most of mobile game use is anonymous, it's hard to collect data on your mobile users. That means the value of that advertising or the CPMs are fairly low and thus the reason it's less than $100 million for us even though we have a large mobile network. We'll continue to experiment with that and we'll continue to look at it, but we don't see that as a giant revenue growth opportunity for us at this point in time. On the international piece, I think some of it's simply driven by the strength of FIFA and FIFA Ultimate Team. Much of FIFA's marketplace is international, particularly Europe. And as that business continues to get stronger, you're going to see that skewing, particularly in a quarter where FIFA Team is so important where there's not as many new releases that'll skew the revenue to the international. One last question?

Operator

Operator

And our final question is from Doug Creutz with Cowen. Doug Creutz - Cowen & Co. LLC: Hey, thanks. I'm going to get way down in the weeds here. There was a story towards the end of the quarter that your in-form players weren't interacting correctly with the chemistry mechanic in FIFA Ultimate Team. It's one of those things you see on Reddit. Has that had any impact on Ultimate Team monetization as you got into the September quarter? And do you feel like you have your arms around getting the mechanics fixed and making sure the player base is happy with the outcome? Andrew P. Wilson - Chief Executive Officer & Director: Yes, so that is getting in the weeds a little bit, but I'm happy to have a conversation about it. So as with any live service, there are times where we find bugs in the software. We stayed very, very close to the community, again, engagement of our community. Ensuring our community has the utmost and highest experience when playing our games is very, very important to us. And so what I'm happy to say is the team was very close, they heard that feedback from the community. They rallied very quickly, the found the bug. They fixed the bug and deployed a fix very, very quickly and were very transparent and open with the community throughout every step of the way. As a result of that, we didn't see any impact to the engagement or the broader interaction with the mode, and quite the opposite. I think what we found was the community deeply appreciated that we were connected with them, that we were listening to them, that we acted quickly, transparently and openly and we solved the problem going forward. As we think about our live services future, this is really how we need to operate as a business. We won't always get the code exactly right, but it's as much about how we operate when we don't quite get it right as it is about when we do. And the commitment we make to gamers is to be very open and transparent with them, to listen to them and always working diligently to deliver the best experience possible. Doug Creutz - Cowen & Co. LLC: Great. Thanks, Andrew. Blake J. Jorgensen - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: With that, I think we'll end the call. I do appreciate everyone's patience around the GAAP to non-GAAP transition that we're making. I encourage everyone to dig in to make sure that you and the rest of your investors understand what the real numbers are because we have already started to see some disconnects between people who don't understand it. So appreciate everyone here on the call communicating the right numbers to people and helping us make this transition. So we'll talk to everyone next quarter.

Operator

Operator

Thank you for your participation. This does conclude today's conference call, and you may now disconnect.