EA redundancies ‘almost complete’

Electronic Arts has revealed that it has completed 92 per cent of the redundancies it has planned for this fiscal year.

The firm announced last night that it had laid off 158 staff in the three months to June 30th.

The redundancies were part of a cost-saving restructure put in place to avoid a repetition of EA’s $1 billion-plus annual loss for FY 2008-2009.

After announcing $641 million losses in Q3 last year, the firm told investors it would lay off 1,100 people, or 11 per cent of its workforce – a task which now appears to be nearing completion.

Speaking in an earnings call after the announcement of EA’s Q1 results yesterday, CFO Eric Brown also revealed that the company wants to increase the percentage of its worldwide headcount working in low-cost locations.

We executed on our cost reduction plans and are largely done with our announced restructuring as of the end of Q1,” said Brown.

Approximately 92 per cent of the headcount reductions were completed and we ended the quarter with 8,948 employees, versus 9,106 last quarter. In addition, 20 per cent of our employees are located in low cost locations.

He added: In terms of the low cost employee composition, it’s at 20 per cent as of the end of the quarter. We are looking to increase that a bit over time.

We’re finding that for certain areas of our business, for example, mobile, lends itself well to having headcounts at lower cost locations, given the diversity of platforms, so that’s worked out extremely well for us in that business and it’s success we’d look to replicate further.”