Sony Improves Forecast

Sony are due to publish their financial results for Q4 FY2009 this Thursday.  With Sony’s fiscal year ending on March 31st those results will detail Sony’s performance during the first three months of the year as well as covering Sony’s performance over their fiscal year as a whole.

Sony must be feeling pretty confident of good news in their results as they have just released a revised forecast for their fiscal year.  With only three days until we see their full official results you can bet that there is not a lot of guesswork in the revised forecast.

Whilst their forecast for sales and operating revenue is down slightly from ¥7,300 billion to ¥7,214 billion their forecast for operating income is up ¥62 billion to ¥32 billion from their forecast the accompanied their third quarter results back in February.

By now, assuming you are still reading this boring, dry financial post, you are probably wondering why you should care.  Well there is a reason beyond just the fact that as PlayStation gamers we obviously benefit if Sony is in good financial health.  In their revised forecast one of the principal factors they cite as a reason for the improved forecast is:

Within the Networked Products & Services segment, operating results are expected to exceed the February forecast by approximately ¥10 billion mainly due to improved performance within the game business and VAIO PCs as a result of better than anticipated reductions in both operating expenses and manufacturing cost. [My emphasis.]

So it looks like the cheaper to manufacture PlayStation Slim is starting to pay dividends (quite literally) for Sony.  We will be back on Thursday with coverage of Sony’s full Q4 FY2009 statement, when we will find out whether there is any guesswork in this forecast.