Capcom has reported “sluggish financial results” for its first fiscal quarter ended June 30, 2010.
Company-wide sales dropped 2.4 per cent to 19,037 million yen ($217.7m / £139.7m), operating income decreased 72.6 per cent to 1,005 million yen ($11.5m / £7.4m), and net income dived 90.4 per cent to 213 million yen ($2.4m / £1.6m).
Quarterly sales for the company’s games division actually rose six per cent to 14,955 million yen ($171m / £110m), but operating income slumped 62.1 per cent to 1,784 million yen ($20.4m / £13.1m).
The company said that Super Street Fighter IV (PS3, 360) and Monster Hunter Frontier Online (PC, 360) “showed steady growth”, but that “overall sales remained stagnant due to weak performances of some titles”. Lost Planet 2 (PS3, 360), “underperformed its projection substantially”, Monster Hunter Tri (Wii) “grew at sluggish pace”, and newly-released Ghost Trick (DS) “struggled”.
“In flagship Consumer Online Games Business, profitability was drastically declined because the performance of Lost Planet 2 struggled to grow,” Capcom said in a statement. “Furthermore, the increase of new flagship titles release from the same term of the previous year, when most sales were made of repeat titles, resulted in the higher game development costs.”
Elsewhere, the firm’s mobile contents unit achieved sales of 680 million yen ($7.8m / £5m) and operating income of 97 million yen ($1.1m / £711,860).
“The market for mobile phone games is growing rapidly,” Capcom said. “In order to expand our business, we started distributing Resident Evil 4 iPad edition, and the number of downloads of the software has been increasing gradually. In addition, those games released for iPhone/iPod touch in the previous term, namely Street Fighter IV and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, achieved their projected sales.”
Capcom forecast full year sales of 95,000 million yen ($1.1b / £697m), up 42.1 per cent year-over-year, and net income of 8,000 million yen ($91.5m / £58.7m), up 269.1 per cent.