As reported on earlier, WWE officially announces its 2010 third quarter results today via press release. Here are some highlights of the results for the third quarter.
* Net Revenue: “Revenues from North America decreased by 3%, led by declines in our Live Event and Home Video businesses, while revenues outside North America increased 2%, led by growth in our Television and Licensing businesses. There was no significant impact from changes in foreign exchange rates in the current quarter.”
* Live Event revenues were $22.8 million, down from $27.2 million in the prior year quarter. WWE explained the 15% decrease due to holding 15 fewer events in North America. The comparison to the last quarter was 78 events (16 international) to 94 events (17 international).
* Pay Per View revenue was $13.6 million, down from $14.5 million in the prior year quarter. This reflected an overall 12% decrease in PPV revenue for the company. It was noted that the price of non-major events like Wrestlemania was raised $5 to $44.95 starting in January 2010.
* Television Rights Fees revenue was $31.1 million, up from $28.3 million in the prior year quarter.
* Home Video revenue was $7.2 million, down from $11.2 million in the prior year quarter. 864,000 units total were shipped during the quarter.
* Licensing revenue was $10.8 million, up from $7.9 million in the prior year quarter. The increase was credited to higher toy sales involving the new partnership with Mattel.
* Magazine Publishing revenue was $2.6 million, down from $3.4 million in the prior year quarter. This number reflected lower newsstand sales.
* WWE.com revenue was $4.0 million, down from $4.5 million in the prior year quarter. This reflected a decline in online advertising and mobile content revenue.
* WWEShop.com revenue was $2.8 million, down slightly from $2.9 million in the prior year quarter. Overall number of orders increased by 7% with the average order figure at $46.04.
* WWE Studios revenue total is now at $7.6 million with all seven releases by the company. The release later adds, “The current quarter results included $3.8 million of revenue associated with our latest film, Legendary. For our first six film projects, we participate in revenues generated by the distribution of these films after the print, advertising and distribution costs incurred by our
partners have been recouped and the results have been reported to us. In September we released our latest film, Legendary, under our revised film strategy. This strategy entails self-distribution and marketing of films. Under this new model, we reflect a film’s gross receipts and its associated distribution and advertising costs in our results. In addition, the change in distribution results in earlier recognition of revenue and expenses relative to initial release of the film as compared to our previous model. As a result of the timing of Legendary’s distribution and advertising expenses, we have recorded a $0.6 million loss for Studios in the current quarter.”
Source: corporate.wwe.com