GameStop sales climb 16 percent

The nation's largest game retailer reported an increase in net earnings of 27 percent for the quarter ending May 1, 2004. Total earnings for the quarter were $8.4 million. Those profits were driven by strong sales of select software titles and higher-than-average sales from the company's 103 stores GameStop opened during the February-through-April quarter.

The company said total revenues increased 16 percent to $371.7 million for the quarter, with console game sales increasing 21 percent over sales in the same quarter last year. In addition to Ninja Gaiden, Fight Night 2004, and MVP Baseball 2004, the company highlighted Final Fantasy XI and Pokémon Colosseum as key drivers of sales. It also said that "an exceptional performance from used video games" added to the spike in sales.

Weak hardware sales contributed to the decline of comparable store sales by 1.8 percent. Company CEO R. Richard Fontaine called the company's first fiscal quarter "marginally disappointing" in the area of hardware sales.

Overall, GameStop saw PC games sales as a percentage of quarterly revenues drop by one percentage point--from 6 to 5 percent. The percentage of revenues driven by console games increased by three percentage points, from 62 to 65 percent of overall revenues.