But we had a pretty diversified portfolio of businesses around the world and things tended to offset each other. But one or two years ago, we had a lot of things happening at the same time.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
You have to remember a lot of business is very cyclical.
There is a wide range of opportunities for us and we see a main part of our strategy as being a company that supplies products across a range of different end applications and indeed we have quite a wide product portfolio which we enhance each year.
Businesses are not just local or even national anymore - good ideas are immediately global. So the market opportunities are much larger than we've ever imagined or seen.
Our company is very diversified, both in terms of geography and in terms of products.
Initially we both did a bit of everything towards making each game but as we began to hire people and the business grew we naturally went in different directions, and away from the coalface of development.
We got bigger, much scarier competitors. We ended up with Microsoft, a company with all the money in the world, the way I look at those guys. And IBM, another company that, historically, dwarfed us.
However, the economics of our business continued to deteriorate. We barely escaped bankruptcy a year ago, and in the aftermath of that escape we had to make some even tougher decisions.
The period from 2002 to 2007 was probably our best period. We created a strategy to build global scale, footprints in each of the geographies and dramatically built our international business.
Being a conglomerate, each of our businesses has a different challenge; business landscape is different for each business. It makes it challenging as well as exciting.
It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference.
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