Chris Liddell: Halo 3 to have a positive impact
In a conference call after the release of Microsoft‘s third quarter sales reports, Microsoft announced that they are expecting Halo 3 to bump up the sales of their Xbox 360s. This is not surprising considering all the hype the game has been generating. Halo 3 has specifically been named by numerous financial analysts as a console mover in the past months.
Chris Liddell, Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft, spoke on their big expectations for Halo 3 saying that “Halo 3 is clearly going to have a positive impact in two senses. One, it gives us more confidence in the number of consoles we think we’re going to be able to sell next year,” adding that “in terms of the direct impact, obviously it’s a first-party product so it’s reasonably profitable from our point of view, and it will be several hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue next year.”
Liddell proceeded to give a quick rundown of their console sales for the quarter saying that sell-in units of the Xbox 360 were in the 500,000 range while sell-through was higher. Regarding their inventory, it has already dropped to normal levels which should be a good thing for Microsoft. Liddel was particularly pleased with this turn-out, stating that “we did see a good inventory movement during the course of the quarter.”
So far Microsoft has reportedly implemented little competitive change in their marketing plans with relation to Sony and this makes Nintendo “very happy from a competitive point of view with the response in the marketplace.”
In a conference call after the release of Microsoft‘s third quarter sales reports, Microsoft announced that they are expecting Halo 3 to bump up the sales of their Xbox 360s. This is not surprising considering all the hype the game has been generating. Halo 3 has specifically been named by numerous financial analysts as a console mover in the past months.
Chris Liddell, Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft, spoke on their big expectations for Halo 3 saying that “Halo 3 is clearly going to have a positive impact in two senses. One, it gives us more confidence in the number of consoles we think we’re going to be able to sell next year,” adding that “in terms of the direct impact, obviously it’s a first-party product so it’s reasonably profitable from our point of view, and it will be several hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue next year.”
Liddell proceeded to give a quick rundown of their console sales for the quarter saying that sell-in units of the Xbox 360 were in the 500,000 range while sell-through was higher. Regarding their inventory, it has already dropped to normal levels which should be a good thing for Microsoft. Liddel was particularly pleased with this turn-out, stating that “we did see a good inventory movement during the course of the quarter.”
So far Microsoft has reportedly implemented little competitive change in their marketing plans with relation to Sony and this makes Nintendo “very happy from a competitive point of view with the response in the marketplace.”