Thursday, May 18, 2006

Gamestop: Still Laughing (At Me)

From NextGeneration:
Videogame retail giant GameStop has reported record revenues and earnings for its first quarter, thanks in large part to strong-selling Xbox 360 titles and improved hardware availability.

...The company reported earnings of $11.7 million for the first quarter ended April 29, compared to $10.3 million for the same period last year. Sales increased 119 percent to $1.04 billion compared to $474.7 million for the comparable quarter. Comparable store sales did decrease however by 3.3 percent which still beat previous guidance of -7 to -9 percent.

...GameStop also updated its financial guidance for the second quarter, as it expects comparable store sales to be between -2 and 1 percent. The company also raised its full year 2006 earnings per share expectations to between $1.93 and $2.03.

Full story here.

Let's make it official: GameStop is kicking the shit out of me. I said they were going to have big problems this year, and I fully expected store closing announcements before fall, and so far I have been wrong, wrong, wrong.

Their numbers are slightly misleading--that 119% revenue increase is apples to oranges, since they didn't own EB at this time last year. And their same store sales were down by over three percent. But they're nowhere near showing the kind of weakness I expected. Yet.

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