Corporate conference calls are not renowned for their entertainment value. Sony’s Q4 FY09 call this afternoon was no different. Forty minutes of Sony executives reading out financial statements (if you think reading them is boring, try listening to someone read them especially when you have already read them yourself earlier in the day) and analysts asking questions about margins, revenues, restructuring costs and price erosion.
Lucky for you then that we here at TSA Towers listened to the conference call for you. In amongst all the thousands of words and figures talked about in the conference calls there are normally a handful that are relevant to us as gamers and PlayStation fans. So here are today’s highlights.
Gross margin for PS3 hardware turned to profit in March…Â No loss on hardware at current price and current cost.
There you have it. Sony are no longer losing money on every PS3 sold. With the new greener and lighter PS3 Slims the PlayStation 3 hardware has finally started making money for Sony directly. Maybe Sony could consider making a “research” model of PS3 available that corporate and academic customers could run, whisper it, an OtherOS on. If nothing else it may prevent the outbreak of war in the Pacific.
PSP was a little bit of a disappointment to us in the last fiscal year.
A masterly example of understatement here from Sony. That little bit of disappointment was the failure of the PSPgo to sell to more than a handful of people, leading Sony’s PSP sales to miss their 15m unit forecast by over 5m! Hate to think what a big disappointment would be for Sony.
We are always looking into future platforms, very premature to talk about future platforms but R&D in those areas is always continuing.
How long before some corner of The Internet decides that that comment is confirmation of the imminent arrival of the PSP2 and PS4?
We are building the PSN platform and revenue is increasing. For the past fiscal year our target was to do about ¥50 billion worth of sales over PSN and we were slightly behind that schedule. In terms of profitability on the network side I think we need to do a little bit more or better to become profitable here.
¥50bn is roughly $544m, €385m or £368m. So while we do not know exactly what global annual PSN sales for FY09 were they are below that figure. But whatever sales and revenue are it seems that Sony is not making a profit on PSN.
Will PSP, PS2 make a loss in [Sony’s financial year ending] March ’11? Â No.
One of the analysts wanted to know whether the declining sales of PSP hardware and PS2 software would start to drag down the profitability of the other parts of the PlayStation ecosystem during the current financial year. Sony’s answer was both short and to the point.