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Bobby Kotick Chief Executive Officer Activision Blizzard ______ The Economic Club of New York 113th Year 549th Meeting __________________________ Bobby Kotick Chief Executive Officer Activision Blizzard __________________________ July 20, 2020 Webinar Moderator: Becky Quick Trustee, The Economic Club of New York Co-Anchor, Squawk Box and On the Money, CNBC The Economic Club of New York – Bobby Kotick – July 20, 2020 Page 1 Introduction Hello. This is Barbara Van Allen, President of The Economic Club. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon, and we’re going to get started in exactly one minute. Thank you. Chairman John C. Williams: Well, good afternoon, and welcome to the 549th meeting of The Economic Club of New York in our 113th year. I’m John Williams. I’m Chairman of The Economic Club of New York and President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The Economic Club of New York is the nation’s leading nonpartisan forum for discussions on economic, social and political issues. This mission is as important today as ever as we continue to bring people together as a catalyst for conversation and innovation. And we proudly stand with all communities seeking inclusion and mutual understanding. A special welcome to guests of our members, members of The Economic Clubs of Chicago and Washington, DC who we’ve also invited to join the webinar today. In addition, we’re happy to welcome members of The Economic Club of New York’s 2020 Class of Fellows. Before we begin, we’d like to thank our healthcare workers and our frontline workers for all that they do, particularly during these challenging times, to keep us healthy and safe. The Economic Club of New York – Bobby Kotick – July 20, 2020 Page 2 So it’s an honor for me to introduce our guest today, Bobby Kotick, Chief Executive Officer of Activision Blizzard. Over the course of nearly 30 years under his leadership, Activision Blizzard has grown to become the world’s most successful interactive entertainment company. The company has over 400 million players in 196 countries and some of the most iconic entertainment franchises, including Call of Duty, Candy Crush, Guitar Hero, Overwatch, and World of Warcraft. Activision Blizzard is a member of the S&P 500, the Fortune 500, and is one of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies. Bobby serves on the boards of The Coca-Cola Company, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Center for Early Education and Harvard Westlake School. Additionally, he’s the founder and co-chairman of the Call of Duty Endowment, a non- profit that has helped 60,000 veterans find high-quality careers. The format today is a conversation, which we’re fortunate to have Economic Club of New York Trustee and anchor for CNBC’s Squawk Box, and On the Money, Becky Quick doing the honors. Now we’ll end promptly at 2:45 and any questions that were sent to the Club from members in advance have been shared with Becky. As a reminder, this conversation is on the record as we do have media on the line. The Economic Club of New York – Bobby Kotick – July 20, 2020 Page 3 Conversation with Bobby Kotick BECKY QUICK: John, thank you very much. Welcome everybody. And Bobby, thank you so much for being here with us. John did an incredible job of kind of laying out a little bit of your purview and what you’ve done, but I think today I’d like to start with the focus on what it’s like to be running a company during coronavirus, what you’re doing in terms of trying to reach out to your customers and how things have changed in dealing with your employees too. You’ve got 10,000 employees on top of the 400 million people who are playing your games right now. And I just wonder if you can kind of walk us back through to the beginning of this year when you first started noticing the problem of Covid-19 and what you did to swing into action. BOBBY KOTICK: Well, thank you first for having me today, and Becky, thank you for taking the time to do this today. We found in January in our offices in China, in Shanghai and other cities in China, that the Chinese government was deeply concerned about what was happening with Covid. We closed our offices and along with our partners, companies like Tencent and NetEase, we started to look at what were the things that we would need to be doing to bring people back to work in China, how would we make sure that our employees in China were going to have the best healthcare and be safe. But we then quickly realized that this would be repeated in every city around the world that we operate. The Economic Club of New York – Bobby Kotick – July 20, 2020 Page 4 So we moved very quickly to close our offices everywhere else in the world. And then what we started to do was look at healthcare protocols. And we had the unfortunate circumstance of a former board member who became very ill the first week of March, was put on a ventilator very quickly, was getting what you would think was very good healthcare here in Los Angeles and realized that there weren’t adequate protocols for how to treat this disease. And we were so concerned about our employees that we decided we would actually take a very proactive approach to looking at the healthcare protocols, both in the communities that we operate but also across the world and really see what we could do to quickly intervene. And there’s a reason that we do this. One of the hallmarks of differentiation that we have as a company, you know many companies offer great financial benefits, lots of companies offer, you know, free food in the cafeteria. We thought that one of the big points of differentiation for the type of talent that we want to attract is having the world’s best healthcare for our employees and their families, and so we’ve always made that a priority for the company. And when this happened, what we realized is that in order to provide that level of healthcare and support for our employees and their families, we would actually have to start doing some real work. So we started funding work into treatment and care and things like programs that were The Economic Club of New York – Bobby Kotick – July 20, 2020 Page 5 supporting convalescent blood transfusion. We have a trial that we’re funding at UCLA on a Japanese antiviral drug. We have programs that we’ve been putting in place to use some early treatments for healthcare workers before they’re actually ill and then new kinds of outpatient programs. All were things that we realized just didn’t exist anywhere in the world in ways to think about treating people differently. BECKY QUICK: That is so far a field from what I think of as being your expertise and what you all do at your company. You’re an entertainment company. You’re a gaming company. You’re somebody who is creating new worlds and thinking creatively. How did you even know where to begin? And how to do things that I think are pretty cutting edge that a lot of the healthcare systems here haven’t even figured out yet, let alone an entertainment company? BOBBY KOTICK: Well, I was fortunate, I have a girlfriend who is pathologist. That helped. But I think we sought out all the great institutions of medicine and tried to really understand what needed to be done, what needed to be funded. And I think, you know, early on what we realized is that there was a lot of confusion about how you treat this disease, you know, at what points do you treat the disease. You know, today, where a lot of the investment and focus has gone is not just in research on treatment protocols but in improved testing. So, you know, we’re running tests. We’ve tested over 1,500 of our employees already in the U.S. And these were complicated things for anyone to The Economic Club of New York – Bobby Kotick – July 20, 2020 Page 6 figure out and so we felt like there was an opportunity to invest in new testing protocols. So, for example, the nasal pharyngeal swab is so uncomfortable that people didn’t want to actually do it. So we had to go get e-waives(?) from the FDA for saliva testing that was PCR-based so you still get the accuracy of a PCR device but you could do it through saliva. We then had to develop an app for employees who were essential workers who had to go back to work if they chose to where we would be able to keep track of their symptoms for them. And each day they would do a symptom checker. Anything that was alarming, it would either connect them to a tele-medical appointment, so we have telemedicine providers from companies like Heal and Doctors Direct, or it would give you an electronic certificate that would actually allow you to go on premise. But we required two negative tests that week prior to allowing anybody back into the office and these are very small percentages of our work population. So we were inventing technology to do contact tracing, to do the control of symptoms, and then to make sure that people were getting adequate access to medical care.
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