Square Enix Goes Global, Online

As reported here earlier, Square Enix shared its earnings today for the year ending March 31, 2009. Here's a summary of the news as reported in Impress Watch's coverage of a press conference with CEO Yoichi Wada, and through information at the Square Enix Holdings investor relations page.

For the full fiscal year, Square Enix saw an 8% drop in sales to 135,693 million yen. Operating income was down 42.9% to 12,277 million yen, with net income down 31.3% to 6,333 million yen.

Looking forward to earnings for this year, the company expects a big jump in sales to 180,000 million yen, and similar leaps in operating income and net income to, respectively, 25,000 million and 15,000 million yen.

Most of the company's increased sales expectations appear to come from its games business, which is expected to rise from 48,000 million yen to 93,000 million yen while all other areas (amusement, publishing, mobile contents, rights & property business) remaining basically level. See below for some possible reasons for this jump.

The company also shared some solid sales figures for the year. Here's a chart showing the top selling Square Enix games this past year:

The blue bars are for Japan, the green bars are for North America, and the yellow bars are for Europe. Units are in the millions.

From top to bottom, the games are:

• Dragon Quest V (DS)
• Dissidia Final Fantasy (PSP)
• Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII (PSP)
• Chrono Trigger (DS)
• Last Remnant (X360/PSP)
• FFCC: Echoes of Time (Wii/DS)
• Final Fantasy IV (DS)
• Infinite Undiscovery (X360)
• Star Ocean 4 The Last Hope (X360)
• Final Fantasy Tactics A2 (DS)
• Dragon Quest IV (DS)
• Valkyria Profile (DS)
• Other (Japan)
• Other (North America)
• Other (Europe)

The figures in the above chart are just for the current term. Some games were released prior to April 1, 2008 and have sold so well that Square Enix decided to highlight them. Crisis Core has seen total worldwide sales of 2.1 million units (830,000 Japan, 720,000 North America, 550,000 Europe). Final Fantasy IV has reached 1.1 million units (620,000 Japan, 300,000 North America, 180,000 Europe). Dragon Quest IV has reached 1.46 million (1.2 million Japan, 111,000 North America, 150,000 Europe). Final Fantasy Tactics A2 has sold 670,000 units (310,000 Japan, 240,000 North America, 120,000 Europe).

So what's up with North America's lack of love for DQIV?

Total Square Enix software sales for the year were 11.06 million units, down from last year's 14.41 million. Of these sales, Japan accounted for 5.19 million, ahead of North America's 3.71 million, Europe's 2.08 million, and Asia's 80,000.

The company expects huge leaps in software sales for the year, as shown in this chart:

Once again, Japan is blue, North America is green, and Europe is yellow. Numbers are in millions.

For this fiscal year, the company expects Japanese software sales to more than double to 13 million. North America will see a big boost to 6 million units sold, with Europe rising to 7 million.

The boosts are presumably a combination of Dragon Quest IX, Final Fantasy XIII, and Eidos. For the former two, see this earlier story about when we can probably expect FFXIII and DQIX.

Looking to the future, Impress Watch reports that Wada shared two key words to describe Square Enix's coming management policy: global and online.

The term "online" here refers not to games with online components, but online game sales. As benefit of a switch to online sales, Wada noted the lowered inventory risks, and also the ability to take part in more direct and precise business for users.

As for the global part, Wada echoed past statements about his desire to fix Square Enix's global sales ratios to match that of the game industry as a whole. "We'd like to be at the same ratio as the market," he said. "The Japanese proportion is, at best, 10% to 20%. We also view Asia as a big market, but we haven't entered it."