Blizzard 2014 Annual Report Download - page 8

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To Our Shareholders
In February, I received this letter from Rocco, a seven-year old from England who is
a big Skylanders fan:
Rocco captioned each of his drawings. The caption for the yellow and red Echidnaruptor
drawing reads: “An Echidna that has volcanos on his head and shoots lava out of his
nose. He is fire element.” Brilliant!
I love receiving letters like Rocco’s. They are a reminder of how passionate our
fans are and the extraordinarily deep ways in which they’re engaging with our
content. (And Rocco is now on our 2026 college recruiting list.)
Rocco is one of over 150 million deeply engaged audience members who make
up our uniquely impassioned global fan base. Last year our audiences spent
almost 12 billion hours playing our games. That doesn’t include the time spec-
tators spent watching content based on our games through Twitch and YouTube,
which accounted for more than a billion viewing hours. And it doesn’t include the
enormous amount of time spent by Skylanders fans like Rocco as they let their
imaginations dream up entirely new characters.
It’s this deep and consistent level of engagement by massive and growing global communi-
ties of gamers that drives our success and continues to provide us with new opportunities
to wow and delight our audiences. It’s why we believe our franchises are more valuable
than even the most recognizable film and television franchises. And it’s why we are confi-
dent that, as owners of a growing library of popular interactive franchises dating back to
the founding of the company 35 years ago, we will continue to generate strong operating
performance and superior shareholder returns as we have for more than two decades.
Understanding Our Results
Since 1991, when Brian Kelly and I purchased our stake in the company and were given
the privilege of managing it, our book value per share has grown from less than $0.01, on
a split-adjusted basis, to $9.76 per share today, a rate of 37% compounded annually. We
outperformed the S&P 500 by a wide margin and have provided shareholders with more
than $10 billion of share repurchases and dividends.
If you had invested $100 in our company 20 years ago, it would have returned over
$4,400 today — almost nine times more than the $520 the S&P 500 would have returned
in that same period of time and almost five times more than Berkshire Hathaway, which
we generally regard as the gold standard to measure just about everything against.
Echidnaruptor
Stomp Chomp
Traptanian Devil
1312
Legacy of the Void,
standalone final chapter of StarCraft II;
currently in closed beta
Real
Time
Strategy
Hi Bobby,
Father Christmas bought me a wii last
Christmas, and Skylanders trap team.
I love it!
I have some AWSOME Sklyanders to
show you that I made up.
I have drawn 30 of them in a book and
given them names. Here are some of them.
I hope you like them and maybe one day
put them in a few Skylanders game!
From Rocco