OPERATIONS

To serve the needs of customers around the world and to improve the quality and usability of products in international markets, we “localize” many of our products to reflect local languages and conventions. Localizing a product may require modifying the user interface, altering dialog boxes, and translating text.

Our operational centers support all operations in their regions, including customer contract and order processing, credit and collections, information processing and vendor management and logistics. The regional center in Ireland supports the EMEA region; the center in Singapore supports the Japan, Greater China and Asia-Pacific region; and the centers in Fargo, Puerto Rico, Reno, and Redmond support North America and Latin America.

We contract most of our manufacturing activities to third parties who produce the Xbox, various retail software packaged products, and Microsoft hardware. Our products may include some components that are available from only one or limited sources. Our Xbox 360 console includes certain key components that are supplied by a single source. The central processing unit is purchased from IBM and the graphics chips and embedded dynamic random access memory chips for the graphics processing unit are purchased from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and NEC Corporation, respectively. Although we have chosen to initially source these key Xbox 360 components from a single supplier, we are under no obligation to exclusively source components from these vendors in the future. Beyond the exceptions noted, we generally have the ability to use other custom manufacturers if the current vendor becomes unavailable. We generally have multiple sources for raw materials, supplies, and components, and are often able to acquire component parts and materials on a volume discount basis.