Electronic Arts Registers in Russia
Electronic Arts, the world's largest producer of computer games, announced yesterday that it is opening a branch in Russia. Until this year, the company sold its products in Russia through the exclusive distributor Softclub, which is engaged in localization as well as sales. Head of the Electronic Arts Russian office Peter Lawton told Kommersant that Softclub will continue to do the company's translations, but Electronic Arts will work directly with the main clients, about 30 percent of the total. Lawton estimated that the company received $20 million through Softclub (about 5 percent of the Russian market). Softclub restricted its comments to saying that its partnership is not threatened.
Lawton hopes to increase Electronic Arts' share of the Russian market to 20 percent in the next four years. The company's products range from $5 disks to $70 gift sets that include headphones. According to IK Finam, Electronic Arts is now hardly noticeable on the market for legal computer games. That market is worth about $350 million in retail prices and is mainly divided between 1C (30%), Novy disk (20%), Buka (17%), Akella (12%) and Russobit (7%). The remainder of the market is shared by about ten different companies.
Electronic Arts was founded in the United States in 1982. Besides games, it produces cellular telephones. It has 7900 employees around the world. Its 24 top games have sold over 1 million copies each in the last year. Four games, Madden NFL 07, Need for Speed Carbon, FIFA 07 and The Sims 2 Pets, sold over 5 million copies. The company's proceeds in the financial year ending on March 31 were $3.091 billion, of which $76 million was net profit. The company's capitalization is $15.4 billion.
Sergey Orlovsky, president of the Nival company, commented that other games companies, such as Novalogic and Rockstar Games, are likely to follow Electronic Arts' example in opening Russian offices. He noted that the Russian market for such games is growing by 25 percent per year, and for platform-based games, which Electronic Arts also produces, the market is growing at twice that rate.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of July 19, 2007
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