Eidos hopes Lara Croft will play Santa

COMPUTER game heroine Lara Croft has a team of 40 working on her latest adventure and Eidos chief executive Mike McGarvey is confident the company will meet a 15 November deadline to hit the pre-Christmas shelves.

The release of the new Lara game on Sony's PlayStation 2 platform is the key date in a new financial year for Eidos in which McGarvey is expecting sales growth of 35%-40%.

With the next instalment of the Lara film out next year Eidos is hoping its most powerful games franchise is set for another bull run. McGarvey said the group is as financially robust as it has ever been, with £50m in cash in the bank.

Eidos intends to hold its fixed costs at £33.2m a year and has ended its football sponsorship deals with the Football Association and Manchester City. Annual net losses to 31 March shrank to £14.1m from £96.4m on sales down 27% to £120.3m. Losses per share fell to 10.7p from 84.5p.