Sony: Game Division in Another Loss

Having said that it has sold 9.24 million PS3s in the year ending March 2008 (and declaring that it really will sell 10 million more to the year ending March 2009), the Sony Corporation has made a 29 billion yen ($142m) profit in the last financial quarter (January to March).

This compares to a 67.6 billion (£331.5 million) yen loss in the same period last year. However, the recent profit actually becomes an operating loss of 4.7 billion yen (£23 million).

The games division itself saw an operating loss of 124.5 billion yen (£615m) compared to a loss of 232.3 billion (£1.1b) in the same period last year.

On the PS3's performance, Sony chief financial officer Nobuyuki Oneda, says "Global sales of PlayStation 3 gained momentum since the launch of the new model and the price cut, allowing the overall game business to turn around in the second half to March alone."

The AFP reports that, "The games division narrowed its losses but remained stuck in the red as the PS3 faced tough competition from Nintendo's Wii."

Reporting the story, US-based money magazine Forbes uses terms such as "struggling PlayStation 3 video game business" to describe the platform's progress from last year.

Bloomberg, however, declares that, "Sony predicted the games business will post its first annual profit in three years after reducing the cost of making PlayStation 3s, versus the 40 billion yen loss projected by analysts. The company lost $3.4 billion from the PlayStation 3 division in the past two years after its flagship player was outsold by Nintendo Co.'s Wii."

A profit for the PlayStation? But there's more. Quotes Bloomberg, "I don't think we have to worry about Sony's game business anymore,'' said Naoki Fujiwara, who oversees the equivalent of $720 million as chief fund manager at Shinkin Asset Management Co. in Tokyo.

"Although sales of the PlayStation 3 don't match those of Nintendo's Wii, they show unexpected resilience.''"

Reuters supports this with a quote from Mitsushige Akino, the chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Investment Management. "The game business is likely to drastically improve and the LCD TV business is also expected to be profitable. If Sony can accomplish these two things, it can easily lift its earnings forecasts, unless the yen starts trading around 90 yen."

By, "the yen starts trading around 90 yen", we assume Reuters misquotes the analyst. For the sake of investors using Ichiyoshi Investment Management, hope so. He obviously meant, "unless the US dollar starts trading around 90 yen".

But all is not so rosy on the analyst front, with the AFP quoting Hirose Osamu, electronics analyst at Tokai Tokyo Research Centre as putting a damper on the gaming division's performance, "But compared to Nintendo, (Sony) has been lagging behind since the beginning. Investors would have liked to see Sony narrow its losses more", says Hirose.

Whichever way you cut the figures though, Sony is certainly not going to stop making PS3s, after all, if making a loss on your gaming output meant closing it down... we wouldn't have the Xbox 360.

^{Sources:
Bloomberg
Forbes
Reuters
AFP}