Activision Blizzard Q2 earnings beat revenue, EPS expectations

Activision Blizzard beat Street expectations for EPS and revenue, reporting $0.81 EPS and $1.93B in revenue, higher than the Street expected $0.69 EPS and $1.7B in revenue. Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre joins The Final Round

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: All right, I want to get to another earnings report that we have here after the bell. Activision Blizzard is out with its results. Taking a look at the stock, it's up just around 1% here after hours. Jared has the details for us. Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: Yeah, it was a beat on both the top and bottom lines. And they also raised their guidance very nicely here. So let's go over the numbers. Second quarter adjusted EPS came in at $0.97 per share. And the estimate was for $0.69.

And their adjusted revenue coming in at 2.08 billion. Estimate was for 1.7 billion. And then in terms of their guidance for the third quarter, they are looking at adjusted revenue of 1.65 billion. The estimate was for 1.39 billion, along with EPS, suggested EPS at $0.60, whereas the estimate was for $0.40.

And then on their net bookings for the second quarter, that came in at 2.08 billion. That's up 70% year over year. This is a company that's growing and facing some tailwinds from the COVID environment in which we are right now. And some more items on their guidance, they're looking for full year adjusted EPS of $2.87, along with revenue of $7.28 billion dollars.

And most of that is exceeding expectations. Previously, they saw their full year EPS at $2.60. And the range is from $2.53 to $3.28 So $3.05, kind of in the middle to upper end of that range. And just to recap, we're looking at beats on both the top and bottom lines, along with a boost in guidance. And we're seeing the stock now trading up about 1% in after hours.

yeah, Jared, you know, I was following the earnings as they came out and obviously, I'm a big dork with a gamer, as you can tell, from this behind me. And I also play a bunch of Activision Blizzard games. But they're really kind of experiencing the same kind of tailwinds that a lot of other gaming companies are.

As a result of the COVID lockdown, you can only, you know, go on Netflix as much as possible. And, you know, just looking at the numbers, I mean, compared to what they had last year, it absolutely blew it out of the water. As well as the expectations, they revised those up from 6.8 billion to the 7.3 you had referenced.

But they're not the only company that's doing this. Take-Two Interactive, they just reported yesterday they saw, I believe, a 50 something percent-- 54% increase in revenue from the prior year quarter. And Microsoft also saw huge gains from its gaming division, Xbox. That was up 54% in re-- sorry, 64% in revenue. And Xbox hardware was up 49% in revenue for their last quarter.

That's basically mind boggling, considering that Microsoft and Sony are going to launch new consoles come around November timeframe. Usually, you would expect them to be seeing a decrease in revenue on those kinds of products. But because of the lockdowns, people need something to do. And that's exactly what they're doing, is turning towards gaming.

SEANA SMITH: Yeah, they certainly are, and we could see that in the stock price really since the start of the year, with Activision Blizzard shares up just over 40% here ahead of these results since January for--