Vivendi's Video Games a (Guitar) Hero
PARIS (TheStreet) -- Vivendi, the big French media conglomerate with interests in video games, music recording and mobile phones, has played Guitar Hero well.
So well, in fact, that as other media giants struggle, Vivendi has thrived.
The company's video-game business, Activision Blizzard, hopes to keep up the pace. Also on Tuesday it released the latest version of
Guitar Hero 5
, this one starring the late Nirvana lead Kurt Cobain.
The entire series of Guitar Hero games has achieved blockbuster status, but now faces stiffer competition from the likes of rival Viacom's rock-star game,
The Beatles: Rock Band
.
Overall, Vivendi posted second-quarter growth in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization -- which excludes one-time items -- of 10.4%, to 1.5 billion euro.
Revenue at Vivendi, whose shares trade on the European bourses, jumped 11% to $6.65 billion.
Compare those numbers to media conglermate peers such as
News Corp.
(NWS) - Get Report
, whose revenue shrank 11% in the second quarter, or
Viacom
(VIA) - Get Report
, which reported a top-line decline of 14%.
Activision Blizzard, formed by the merger of Viviendi's video-game unit with the U.S.-based Activision last year, has a slew of best-selling titles, including
Guitar Hero
,
Call of Duty: World at War
, and
World of Warcraft
.
The unit posted revenue in the second quarter of 762 million euro, up from last year's Activision-less 223 million euro.
Vivendi's mobile phone, Internet and pay-TV businesses -- the real cash cows of the company -- also recorded strong results in the quarter, with revenue rising 4.2% to $3.1 billion.
Activision Blizzard reaffirmed its previously announced full-year earnings target of 63 cents a share, but reduced its sales estimate to $4.5 billion from $4.8 billion, citing slower demand and the postponed releases of the games
Singularity
and
StarCraft II
until next year.
The company's chief, Jean-Bernard Levy, also reaffirmed his position that Vivendi will record "strong" full-year earnings growth.
About Vivendi's only weak spot was its Universal Music Group, the largest recording company in the world, whose artists include huge acts such as U2, Eminem and Lady Gaga.
But best-selling records weren't enough to staunch the losses from the developing obsolescence of the compact disc. Universal's revenue declined 7.5% to $983 million from a year ago.
-- Written by Scott Eden in New York
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Scott Eden has covered business -- both large and small -- for more than a decade. Prior to joining TheStreet.com, he worked as a features reporter for Dealmaker and Trader Monthly magazines. Before that, he wrote for the Chicago Reader, that city's weekly paper. Early in his career, he was a staff reporter at the Dow Jones News Service. His reporting has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Men's Journal, the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times, and the Believer magazine, among other publications. He's also the author of Touchdown Jesus (Simon & Schuster, 2005), a nonfiction book about Notre Dame football fans and the business and politics of big-time college sports. He has degrees from Notre Dame and Washington University in St. Louis.
