It's that time of the year where many of the big corporates have to 'fess up to their shareholders about well they've been doing. And considering the recent ballyhoo about credit crunches and banking failures, it's unlikely to be a pretty picture.

It's certainly a mixed bag over at EA, which has been frantically restructuring over the past year as it tries to drive down costs.

The good news is that the mobile division has been doing okay. According to the standard GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) rules, EA Mobile's revenue for its 12-month financial year ending 31st March was up 24 percent to $189 million.

Revenue during its fourth quarter (1st January to 31st March 2009) was up 20 percent to $49 million compared to the same period in 2008. However Q4 revenue was the same as EA Mobile's Q3 revenue, suggesting that the immediate growth in the mobile sector has stopped. Indeed, if you consider the growth the division should have received in terms of App Store revenue during the period, this could be something of a worry.

More generally, EA's total GAAP net revenue across the entire games business for the financial year 1st April 2008 to 31st March 2009 was up 15 percent to $4.2 billion compared to the previous 12 months. Non-GAAP revenue was up 2 percent to $4.1 billion. (The difference between GAAP and non-GAAP is non-GAAP is used to strip out one-off costs and income to try and make year-on-year comparisons easier.)

More problematic though was the fact that the company made an overall loss for the year using either accounting measure.

The GAAP net loss for the year was a monstrous $1.1 billion as compared with a net loss of $454 million for the prior year. Non-GAAP net loss was $96 million as compared with net income of $339 million a year ago.

And perhaps even more significant in terms of the company's exposure to the wider economic situation was the collapse in trailing-twelve-month operating cash flow from $338 million in FY08 to a mere $12 million.

Still EA's warchest contains $2.2 billion in cash and other liquid investments so it's not going bust anytime soon.