Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome to the Electronic Arts 2020 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. Now I'd like to introduce your host today, Chris Evenden. Please go ahead, sir.

Thanks, operator, and hi, everyone. Welcome to the Electronic Arts 2020 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. My name is Chris Evenden, and I'm EA's Vice President of Investor Relations. First, I'd like to cover the agenda for today. We'll start with the official business of the meeting. Then Blake Jorgensen, our COO and CFO, will give a short financial presentation followed by a Q&A session. During this meeting, we may make forward-looking statements about future events or the future financial performance of the company. Actual events or results may differ materially. We refer you to the company's most recently filed Form 10-K for a discussion of risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those discussed today. Now I'll turn the meeting over to Andrew Wilson, EA's Chief Executive Officer.

Thanks, Chris. Good afternoon, and welcome to the Electronic Arts 2020 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I'm joined in the meeting by all of the members of our Board of Directors, including Larry Probst, the Chairman of this meeting. Each of our current directors has been nominated for and has consented to serve for a 1-year term. Their biographies and qualifications begin on Page 8 of your proxy statement. I'm also joined by EA's executive team and representatives from KPMG LLP, the company's independent auditors. Jake Schatz, the secretary of this meeting, will now conduct the formal business of the meeting.

Thanks, Andrew. If you meet the voting requirements and have not yet already voted, you may do so in the virtual meeting room. Andrew Wilcox from Broadridge Financial Solutions has been appointed as Inspector of Elections and is in attendance. A list of EA stockholders as of the record date, June 12, 2020, is available on the virtual meeting website for examination by any stockholder present today or by any proxyholder representing a stockholder. I am advised by the inspector of elections that a total of 248,698,648 or over 86% of our outstanding shares eligible to vote are present in person or by proxy. A quorum is present, and the meeting is authorized to transact business. It is 2:03 p.m. and the polls are open. Proposal 1 is the election of 9 members of the Board for a term of 1 year. The Board has nominated the following persons and recommends a vote for each nominee: Leonard Coleman, Jay Hoag, Jeffrey Huber, Lawrence Probst, Talbott Roche, Richard Simonson, Luis Ubiñas, Heidi Ueberroth and Andrew Wilson. Proposal 2 is an advisory vote to approve named executive officer compensation. The Board recommends a vote for this proposal. Proposal 3 is the ratification of the appointment of KPMG as the company's independent public registered accounting firm for fiscal year 2021. The Board recommends a vote for this proposal. Proposal 4 is a stockholder proposal to allow stockholders to act by written consent. This proposal was submitted jointly by James McRitchie and Myra Young. Mr. McRitchie will present the proposal. Operator, please open Mr. McRitchie's phone line so he may proceed.

Yes, sir. Mr. McRitchie is live.

Okay. This is Jim McRitchie. The proposal was on written consent #4. Many Boards and investors assume a false equivalency between rights of written consent and special meeting. However, any shareholder, regardless of how many or few shares she owns, can seek to solicit written consent on a proposal. By contrast, calling a special meeting may require a 2-step process. Shareholder that does not own the minimum shares required, in the case of Electronic Arts, that's more than $10 billion worth, must first obtain the support of other shareholders. Once that meeting is called, the shareholder must distribute proxies asking shareholders to vote on the proposal to be presented at the meeting. This 2-step process can take more time and expense than the 1-step process of soliciting written consent, especially in Electronic Arts, which allows only investors with 25% of outstanding shares to call a special meeting instead of 10% as allowed by many companies. Similar proposals to this won more than 50% of the vote recently at Stanley Black & Decker, Berry Global Group, Flowserve, JetBlue, United Rentals, Capital One, Cigna, Applied Materials and Nuance. I urge you to enhance shareholder value by voting in favor of written consent proposal #4. Thank you.

The Board of Directors recommends a vote against this proposal. Further information about the proposal can be found in the proxy statement. If you already have voted by proxy, you do not need to cast a vote -- a ballot unless you wish to change your vote. The proxy holders will vote your shares as indicated on your proxy. If you wish to vote now, you may do so through the virtual meeting room. [Voting]

It is 2:06 p.m. The polls for voting are now closed, and no further proxies or ballots will be accepted. I have been advised by the inspector of elections that over 86% of the shares outstanding were voted by proxy and counted prior to the meeting. As of now, a majority of the votes cast either in person or by proxy were voted for each of the 9 nominees for director, for proposals 3 and 4, and against proposal 2. The final voting results, including those votes submitted during today's meeting, will be filed with the SEC on a Form 8-K within 4 business days. This now concludes the formal business portion of this meeting. I declare the 2020 annual meeting of stockholders adjourned. We now will move on to a short financial presentation by Blake Jorgensen.

Thank you very much, Jake, and I am sorry we are unable to do this annual meeting in person. I know that has been important for many people over the years. It is clearly a difficult time across the entire world, and I hope everyone is healthy and safe. Unfortunately, we've been through a difficult time, but fortunately, it has benefited our business dramatically. And as I think people can understand, everyone has redirected their entertainment dollars to ways that are more focused on in-home. We're not going to restaurants. We're not going to concerts, to sports events, et cetera. And that has benefited our whole industry and clearly our business. And as you might have heard from our first quarter results last week, we had guided to net bookings for the full year of $5.55 billion. We've now raised that guidance to $5.95 billion, a substantial increase in people playing all of our games across all of our different titles, sports, non-sports, the catalog. It has been an amazing time for our business. We know that this will moderate over time but, for us, it is clearly a strong first quarter, a strong year ahead and increases in operating cash flow that are also strong, much better than we had anticipated for the year. We have, as I think all of you know, an incredible portfolio of titles across sports, non-sports, free-to-play, mobile. And in this difficult time, we have been able to utilize that broad portfolio to engage people across many different properties and franchises that they love. In a world in which there is no live sports, we have seen a huge increase in engagement with our sports. And we think that will continue to help us going forward. And so we feel very strong about the business, but we're also very concerned about making sure that we can continue to deliver the business as we've promised and as we think we can and concerned about the communities around the world who are suffering. We're doing everything possible to make sure our employees are well taken care of during this difficult time. And we're very confident that we have a strong business, but we're also going to be cautious about how we think about that going forward as well as potential impacts on the broader economy. So with that, I will turn it to Chris Evenden to moderate any Q&A that is coming through on the virtual meeting.

Yes. Thank you, Blake. We have, I think, 3 questions in the queue at the moment. So I'll start with one that I can answer straightaway myself, which is we've been asked how many shareholders are in attendance. We actually have 14 shareholders logged in as shareholders and able to ask questions right now, which is more than we would get in person typically. The second question we've been asked of management, I think I'll start with Andrew for this question, is how do you expect COVID-19 to affect the company's business and the performance both in the short and the long term?

Thank you for the question. I think it's a great question. Certainly, what we have seen over the last quarter is that the situation around COVID has certainly helped our business. Our focus, first and foremost, of course, is always on the safety of our people and people around the world. And we've spent a lot of energy around that. As you know, we effectively had our entire global team shift to work from home in mid-March. Beyond essential workers in our locations needed for security, infrastructure, et cetera, all of our functional teams have been working from home. We are not in a rush to return to our facilities, especially as we see reports from different parts of the world with surging COVID cases. We want to keep our people and their families as safe as possible. At this point, we've guided our teams that they should be prepared for the likelihood that many of us will not return to offices this calendar year. We're working to support our teams as best we can. We are -- and as we move back, we're thinking about this in a very cautious and methodical way and providing added financial support and pandemic care leave for all of our people as they need it. It is hard to predict how the rest of the year will play out with respect to impact on our business. We've seen a tremendous amount of people come into our network of players through this phase. And our expectation is as they form relationships with their friends in the context of playing our games that we will be able to retain many of them in our network and continue to deliver interactive entertainment to them for a long time to come.

Yes. And if I can add to Andrew's comments. If you look at our first quarter earnings -- revenue and earnings, $1.1 billion of the $1.4 billion was from live services. And our live service business is an everyday business and it's very cross-functional, and it just shows the power of our company and our employees to work together from home, which none of us would have ever experienced -- or we've never experienced and we never would have anticipated. But we're able to run daily businesses across all of our products to generate the financial results that we saw.

Thanks, Blake and Andrew. Okay. So the final question we have here is -- I mean it's a big question. So there's a lot we can say, but maybe we'll just keep to the highlights now. And if you want to follow up in detail, we can follow up afterwards, but the question is what has the firm done with respect to ESG issues in the past year. Maybe I'll start that with Andrew.

Yes. I'll take that one. Thank you. Again, another great question, something that's very important to us. Building a culture of inclusion allows us to create games and experiences that engage and inspire a diverse group of players around the world. We're always looking at how we can build diversity into our organization and hire and retain diverse talent. As you look at women in top leadership positions, including Laura Miele, our Chief Studios Officer; Mala Singh, our Chief People Officer; and half of Laura's leadership team across our studio group is female. We're building extensive career development programs across the many diverse members of our population. We have employee resource groups across the organization that empower every employee to reach their full potential. We've launched 6 ERGs in 23 global offices. We have inclusion training across the company and deep community outreach. To the extent that we have the ability to use our platform for good in the community, diversity is deeply rooted in our teams and the creative process. We at Electronic Arts are well-known for how we positively represent diverse characters and inclusive environment in our games. UFC 3 include a full roster of female UFC fighters, and UFC 4 will as well. Our NBA games include the full WNBA roster. Sims upholds values of diversity and inclusion, and diverse characters across our EA SPORTS games, including women national teams in FIFA. Alex Hunter is a lead character in The Journey are just a few of the things that our teams do to drive this for our company. There are many examples of how EA works in this way and makes a difference to our community through activism, sponsorship, volunteerism like Girls Who Code, mentoring and encouraging more students to pursue STEM-related careers. There are also extensive areas that we have worked to ensure that our company is more environmentally friendly, with respect to how we operate our data centers, with respect to how we think about our move from packaged goods to digital and the savings on packaging and plastics that, that does. We published many of these on our website and in other forums. And we'll continue to share these more broadly.

Thanks, Andrew. There are no further questions. So that concludes the Electronic Arts Annual Meeting of Stockholders. Thank you all for participating in the meeting today. Goodbye.

Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.

Thank you.