Take-Two rose 8% on a pre-order number nobody outside the company has seen

Take-Two closed at US$224.00 on Tuesday, up 8%, after telling investors that pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto VI are running far above what it expected. It did not say how far.

The quarter it actually reported was poor. Net bookings fell 18% to US$1.60 billion, below the company's own guidance of US$1.62 billion to US$1.67 billion. The shares rose anyway.

The game arrives on 19 November at US$79.99 for the standard edition and US$99.99 for the ultimate edition. Take-Two has guided December-quarter bookings to between US$3.35 billion and US$3.5 billion.

Chart: Take-Two's value rises before GTA VI ships. Two scales, both US$bn: revenue by year to March (left), market value at each year end (right). The latest, US$42.0bn on 10 November, predates Tuesday's rise. — This story’s chart of the day: the numbers, the dark version and the animated version are on its own page. The chart’s page →

José Montalvo, an economics professor at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, reckons about 1.5 million American workers will skip a day's work for the launch, at a cost of roughly US$1 billion in lost output.

The tell

Take-Two has kept its full-year bookings forecast at US$8 billion to US$8.2 billion, which is the number that commits it to something. I'd want to see the opening weekend before taking the pre-order talk at face value.

This story ran in The Half-Point Problem Wednesday 11 November’s edition, with the market snapshot, the other two stories, the numbers and the week ahead. Read the whole edition →

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