EA keen on Take-Two "diamonds"

Warren Jenson, chief financial officer at Electronic Arts, has told an investor's conference that his company is keen to give Take-Two's "diamonds" a chance to shine brighter on the global stage, and that he hopes continued industry creativity will lead to further acquisition opportunities in the future.

"We consider the people at Take-Two, and the studios and IPs, as diamonds," he told the audience at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference.

"These are very strong creative organisations that have produced some terrific intellectual propertiesâ¦from our perspective we take the view that this is an opportunity to work with some wonderfully creative people.

"Broadly, if you look at Take-Two, it has the following macro issue: it is a subscale business in a world where scale really matters. So from our perspective, the longer we wait, the greater the risk.

"What we can do is take these diamonds, and really involve them in an organisation that does have global scale and that can help to work them to maximise the total effectiveness for the true market horsepower that their titles can have in the global marketplace."

He also talked about the conditions for acquisition, and when asked if creativity should come from external purchases or internal development, he explained it should be both.

"The good news is that no one individual or company has a right to exclusive creativity," he said. "So there are going to be highly creative entrepreneurial organisations that may be seeking more of a permanent home, and that's going to make acquisitions available.

"Good examples of that would be our acquisition of Bioware/Pandemic, it could have been Criterion a few years ago, or Digital Illusions - the interesting this is that all of those suddenly become part of your infrastructure, so I'm not sure where it stops being an acquisition and starts being your core team, but we clearly look for innovation in all of our titles.

"Creativity has no bounds, it's part of our internal operating structure - the good news for all of us is that we have no exclusive rights to creativity, and hopefully what that means is that there will continue to be acquisition opportunities too."

During the session he also talked about the company's view on increasing market share, and the importance of the title spread as well as innovation.

"What we're trying to do under John's leadership is take a lot of swings," he said. "Those are targeted swingsâ¦we have a lot of high quality IPs being developed by high quality teams. I can't tell you that every one will work, but I think we've got a lot of good swings, where we think our chances are pretty good."

EA has had two offers for Take-Two rejected, with negotiations currently set to continue the day after the release of Grand Theft Auto IV on April 29.