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Namco Bandai’s Financials In The Red; Plans Restructuring
Namco Bandai recently released it financial statements for the first nine months of 2009, and the company’s wallet is looking pretty thin right now. The losses total up to 11.7 billion yen ($129 million), which is an extraordinary dive compared to 2008’s numbers for the same time period, which saw a gain of 9.01 billion yen ($99.6 million).
On the heels of this announcement came some other unfortunate news. Namco Bandai is initiating an internal company review called “Group Restart Plan.” This means that Namco will likely be offering severance packages to its Japanese employees in hopes of trimming down its workforce by a total of 10 percent, a number that would equate to 630 job losses. As the news site industrygamers.com reported, Namco released a statement saying, “While the consolidation of administrative tasks and other streamlining and cost-cutting efforts at key companies have yielded some results, the Group lost speed on the operational side. We determined that our inability to fully deliver products and services that responded flexibly to the changing market environment and user preferences led to declining profitability.”
Considering that Namco didn’t release many quality games last year – aside from Tekken 6 – these kinds of losses shouldn’t be too surprising. While it looks like the restructuring will be contained to the Japanese half of the company, it will be interesting to see if these deals end up effecting games like Splatterhouse, Inversion, and Enslaved.
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