Sony Profits Plunge - Video Games Losses Halved

Sony's chief financial officer, Nobuyuki Oneda, has had to tell the world that in comparison to the same period last year, the company's operating profit is down 90%.

The numbers say that operating profit was 11.0 billion yen (£70b) for the quarter ending in September 2008 compared to 111.6 billion yen (£715b) for the same period in 2007.

This comes shortly after the company cut its yearly profits forecast by 57%.

The drop is apparently due to poor performance by the company's TV and financial services divisions. From a gamer's perspective, the AFP reports that for the video game division, year-on-year "losses more than halved to 39.5 billion yen thanks to a recovery in sales of Playstation3 and Playstation Portable..."

In fact, Sony apparently sold 85% more PS3s from July to September this year than in the same period last year, with 2.43 million units hitting stores in 2008. This lead to a halving in the losses for the division year-on-year to 39.5 billion yen (£252.9b).

Still, if your parent company is stumbling along taking such hits, there must be some concern in the video gaming boardroom. When Nintendo comes along and declares that it expects is profits to be up when it declares figures on Thursday, well, you'll probably want to disappear into a game of LittleBigPlanet (not available in Japan right now).

^{Sources:
AFP
AP
MCV}