Electronic Arts Inc.

David, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Electronic Arts Q3 Fiscal 2021 Earnings Conference Call. Mr. Chris Evenden, VP of Investor Relations, you may begin your conference.

Thanks, David. Welcome to EA's third quarter Fiscal 2021 Earnings Call. With me from their homes today are Andrew Wilson, our CEO, and Blake Jorgensen, our CFO and COO. Please note that our SEC filings and our earnings release are available at ir.ea.com. In addition, we have posted earnings slides to accompany our prepared remarks. We will post our prepared remarks, an audio replay of this call, our financial model, and a transcript. Once again, I'd like to direct you to the earnings slide this quarter. They now contain the metrics and color that we have historically included in Blake's remarks. With regards to our calendar, our Q4 fiscal 2021 earnings call is scheduled for Tuesday, May 11th. As a reminder, we post our entire year of earnings calls on our IR website. This presentation and our comments include forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future financial performance of the company. Actual events and results may differ materially from our expectations. We refer you to our most recent Form 10-Q for discussion risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from those discussed today. Electronic Arts makes these statements as of today, February the 2nd, 2021, and disclaims any duty to update them. During this call, the financial metrics, with the exception of free cash flow, will be presented on a GAAP basis. All comparisons made in the course of this call are against the same period in the prior year unless otherwise stated. And now I'll turn the call over to Andrew.

Thanks, Chris. I hope this finds all of you well and staying healthy amidst the ongoing pandemic. This continues to be a record-breaking year for Electronic Arts. We've delivered net bookings and earnings above our guidance each quarter, and we are raising guidance today for the remainder of FY21. After starting this fiscal year with guidance for $5.55 billion in net bookings, we're now expecting to achieve nearly $6.1 billion in net bookings for the full year, and we are projecting growth in our business to continue next fiscal year. We're delivering exceptional high quality experiences across the unmatched breadth and depth of our portfolio. We are driving growth through our live services and we are reaching new players by bringing our content and subscription to more platforms. Drilling down on these growth drivers. EA Sports is at the core of the sports experience for hundreds of millions of fans. More and more people, especially younger Gen Z players, are now defying their sports fandom through the games they play, like FIFA, Madden, NHL, and UFC. In the past fiscal year, we've had more than 230 million people engaged with our EA Sports franchises and content. We delivered six new high-quality sports games in FY21, including FIFA 21 and Madden NFL 21 on the new Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, ushering in a new generation of sports games. FIFA continues to grow on every platform. We set a new record of nearly 6 million daily active players in FIFA Ultimate Team in December, and FUT matches have grown a staggering 177% year-over-year. FIFA Online 4 in Korea has had higher player acquisition in every quarter of this year compared to last year. And we now have nearly 21 million players in FIFA Mobile Asia. We are driving growth across our EA Sports portfolio. Madden NFL has more players engaged in the franchise than ever before. NHL engagement is up 13% year over year. And since launch, UFC 4 has consistently had 20% more daily players than our previous game. EA Sports is at the center of innovation, both in our games as well as how fans are connecting through our games to their friends and to the sport they love. For example, in a year where an in-person Pro Bowl event was not possible, we worked with our NFL partners to create the first ever virtual Pro Bowl in Madden NFL 21. This was a groundbreaking experience for fans, where playing Madden actually helped to select two Pro Bowl players. The Pro Bowl itself then took place in Madden NFL 21 with the Sean Watson and Carla Murray leading teams of NFL stars in highly entertaining broadcasts that aired on Twitch, the NFL Network, and NFL social channels last Sunday. Now the Super Bowl is just a few days away and we're preparing new content in and outside Madden NFL for the increasing number of players engaging with our franchise around the NFL's championship game. Events like this year's Pro Bowl demonstrate how real-world sports experiences are evolving to become interactive, and you can expect to see us continue to lead here. Our fans are telling us that they want more of what EA Sports can deliver. They're playing more of our games than ever before, they're spending more time with our content, and they're connecting with each other, the players and teams and sport they love through our experiences. We are now set to build on our leadership position with an aggressive expansion plan for EA Sports. We have important announcements we are making today and more that we expect to make in the weeks ahead that will lead to more great games and content for fans and significant new growth for our company. We have a major global expansion of our soccer business underway. As the scale of our EA Sports FIFA player audience expands, including a growing Gen Z population, we will offer more great content on more platforms with our longstanding partners across all the top leagues and teams in the sport. We are bringing FIFA online to new territories, including Russia, Poland, and Turkey, with a combined audience of 80 million players. We are also accelerating our focus on mobile with six new soccer mobile experiences in development today for different regions and genres. EA Sports is the premier partner for football organizations, leagues and teams around the world. And today we are announcing that EA Sports FIFA will continue to be the exclusive home of UEFA Champions League football. As part of our new partnership with UEFA, we'll also be launching new esports competitions and we'll have even more news in this space in the month ahead. We're bringing new types of experiences to market that will expand the genre. In partnership with KLAB, we're developing a groundbreaking new mobile experience inspired by the Japanese market, which we believe will have global appeal. We're thrilled to announce today that EA Sports is returning to college football. So many fans have been asking us to please bring back college football video games. Their passion for this top-selling sports franchise has never wavered. We love college football as well, and today we're very excited to say, yes, we are coming back. We have started work on an all-new next-gen experience, working closely with our exclusive licensing partners at CLC to include the universities, logos, venues, and game day traditions that fans know and love in college football. We will grow the EA Sports portfolio to include experiences in more sports for more fans around the world. In the weeks and months ahead, we will make more announcements about our expansion into different sports, including at least one new experience that will launch next fiscal year. We're also incredibly excited to build a racing powerhouse with our proposed acquisition of Codemonsters. These are amazing teams that we know very well, and we are adding significantly to our racing portfolio to drive growth. Formula One is one of the few truly global sports and is already seeing unprecedented growth in worldwide fandom, including in North America and Asia. We believe the combination of EA Sports and Codemasters can take the game franchise to an even greater level. We are awaiting a result of a Codemasters shareholder vote on our offer, which we anticipate having tomorrow, February the 3rd. With the strength of our EA Sports franchises and these announcements today, we're in a position to deliver the world's best sports games and content. We intend to leverage our capabilities in this space to grow to more sports and more experiences, reaching larger audiences in more markets all over the world. These announcements today are just the beginning. For 230 million EA Sports players and viewers, we are providing a social network that enables them to experience more of the sport they love with their friends. We believe we can grow to 500 million players and viewers in EA Sports experiences over the next five years. The future of entertainment is interactive, and the future of sports will continue to blur the lines between live sports and immersive and engaging new experiences. EA Sports is at the center of this convergence, and in collaboration with our amazing league partners, we are prepared to accelerate the future of sports entertainment. In addition to EA Sports, we are driving growth through our portfolio of more than 20 top live services. I'll give two examples from our deep roster of wholly owned IP. We are at the two-year anniversary of the launch of Apex Legends, and with 30% growth in new players year over year, its success is accelerating. The unique seasons of live service content delivered by our Coward Respawn team are expanding the Apex audience, bringing in more players with great storytelling and engaging in-game events. Competitive play in Apex Legends is also reaching and entertaining more viewers, with recent events in November driving new viewership and watch time records. This is an outstanding live service business that continues to grow across multiple dimensions. Launching the game on Steam is bringing in new PC players. We will launch on the Nintendo Switch on March 9 and we'll expand further with our Apex mobile game rolling out in FY22. The Sims 4 has grown every year since launch. As we expand the experience, more new and relevant content, we engage a diverse and growing audience spanning players of all ages and demographics. Life to date, more than 33 million people have now played The Sims 4, and daily, weekly, and monthly average players in the game all reached all-time highs for the third quarter in December. Our Maxis team just delivered the 10th expansion pack for The Sims 4, and we see continued growth for our Sims business in FY22. We have the ability to bring games to every platform, and we are driving continual expansion of our total addressable market. Mobile continues to be a key opportunity for us. Games like Star Wars Gods of Heroes continue to be deeply engaging for players and very successful businesses. And we have plans to aggressively grow our mobile portfolio. We're also expanding our lead in subscriptions. The groundbreaking integration of our EA Play service with Microsoft Game Pass has accelerated our subscription business with nearly 13 million players now active in our service across four platforms, Xbox, PlayStation, Steam, and our EA client. With more players valuing the subscription model and with our scale across platforms and content, we are building a strong, growing business with recurrent revenues. We also have new streaming players joining our network through Xbox Cloud Gaming with Game Pass Ultimate and other partners, and we are committed to advancing cloud as a meaningful part of the future of the gaming ecosystem. FY21 has been a year of outstanding growth while working through the challenges of the ongoing pandemic. Our execution continues to be strong, even with our employees working from home, and we expect that most will continue to do so through September. The creativity and innovation of our talented teams is enabling us to deliver more great experiences in our leading franchises and live services. We have a deep and robust pipeline of new content with more than 35 new games in various levels of incubation and development for the future. We're looking forward to sharing a lot more about our FY22 plans in the months ahead, including our next Battlefield experience, which will mark a return to all-out military warfare. The game takes full advantage of the power of next-generation platforms to bring massive, immersive battles to life with more players than ever before. Featuring maps with unprecedented scale, the next edition of Battlefield takes all the destruction, player agency, vehicle and weapon combat that the franchise is known for and elevates it to another level. The team is focused and the game is ahead of our internal milestones. We'll reveal the game in the spring and deliver a defining Battlefield experience for our players in the 2021 holiday season. Games helped fill a great need in people's lives through 2020. Our franchises are where so many around the world are coming for connection, entertainment and inspiration. We're looking forward to delivering more great experiences for hundreds of millions of people engaging with us and driving continued growth in our business through Q4 and into FY22. Now, I'll turn the call over to Blake.