Today Ubisoft announced its financial results for the first quarter of the fiscal year 2020-21, related to the period between April 1, 2020, and June 30, 2021.
First and foremost, we learn that Rainbow Six Quarantine and Far Cry 6 have been delayed to the next fiscal year, which means after March 2021 due to the impact of COVID 19.
Below you can see a handy table with a summary of the publisher’s results.
As usual, CEO Yves Guillemot provided a comment on the company’s quarterly performance.
“The videogame industry is benefitting from very strong momentum. It is by far the fastest growing segment of entertainment and is driving unprecedented consumer engagement and social interactions. In this context, our strategy and competitive advantages continue to be fully validated by recent industry announcements of consolidation and new platform launches.
The value of videogame IPs has never been so strong and these announcements highlight the importance of owning a deep and
diversified portfolio of high-quality franchises. Thanks to this major asset, which we have built up organically over more than two decades, Ubisoft has entered into fruitful partnerships with the biggest technological and videogame platforms, who are all thrilled to onboard our content.At the same time, we continue investing to increasingly leverage our direct-to-player relationship.
Over the past ten years, we have built our proprietary online distribution and services ecosystem, our unique identifier across games and platforms and our unparalleled production capacity. These are formidable assets for strengthening this direct relationship.
Through multiple entry points and business models, and with the introduction of Ubisoft Connect, we aim to offer players frictionless access and enriching experiences across our full catalog of games. This will expand discoverability, traffic and global engagement to ultimately provide meaningful value for our players, our teams and our shareholders over the coming years.”
Chief Financial Officer Frédérick Duguet also commented:
“Q2 was another quarter of outperformance for Ubisoft, driven by the appeal of our deep and diversified portfolio of franchises and our broad
range of Live services. This excellent dynamic allows us to deliver record profitability over the first half. We are proud of our teams for demonstrating amazing dedication and resilience during these challenging times, especially considering that a clear majority of our developers are still working from home. They have continued to deliver outstanding Live services and content at a high cadence while simultaneously developing the most ambitious line-up in the industry.We continue to look at the year ahead with confidence and can’t wait to have players get their hands on our games. That starts today with Watch Dogs: Legion, which has solid ratings, and will be followed by Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, which is set to be one of this holiday season’s biggest
mainstream titles, and by Immortals Fenyx Rising, our brand-new, fresh and light-hearted IP.Thanks to our early positioning, we expect the strong momentum of next gen consoles to be a material catalyst for our games. Benefitting from this strong momentum and despite having moved Far Cry 6 and Rainbow Six
Quarantine to 2021-22 to leverage their full potential in the context of production challenges caused by COVID-19, our new non-IFRS operating income targets for 2020-21 remain within the boundaries we set back in May. Being able to maximize the long term value of our IPs while at
the same time maintaining solid financial targets highlights the increasing recurring nature of ourrevenue s, the strength of our portfolio of franchises, confidence in our holiday season releaseslate and current supportive industry dynamics.”
On top of that, the press released includes a list of highlights for the company’s quarterly achievements.
- 100 million unique players active in the first half of the fiscal year on PC and consoles, in line with the full calendar year 2019
- Second fiscal quarter: Net bookings of €344.7 million, well above the target of approximately €290.0 million
- Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six® Siege:
- Solid player acquisition during the quarter
- Over 65 million registered players and circa €2.5 billion in cumulative total consumer spending since launch
- Assassin’s Creed® Odyssey:
- Very sharp Q2 increase in sell-through, daily engagement and PRI, up by more than 200%, 250% and 400% respectively vs Assassin’s Creed Origins (on a comparable basis)
- Tom Clancy’s The Division® 2, For Honor® and The Crew® 2:
- Double-digit year-on-year growth in Q2 net bookings for each of the three games
- Just Dance:
- Franchise Net bookings up by more than 100% in Q2 versus Q2 2019-20
- Ubisoft Connect:
- Ubisoft’s player ecosystem gets the biggest overhaul in its history and paves the way for cross-platform features and communities to build discoverability, traffic and overall engagement
Below we see a breakdown of sales by platforms and region.
Interestingly, PC is the top seller for Ubisoft in the second quarter, while PS4 remains at the top for the first half of the fiscal year. Xbox One places third for both timeframe, mobile is fourth, and the Nintendo Switch follows in last place.
If you want to compare, you can check out the results related to the previous quarter, which were published in July.
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