electronics
Chip crisis continues to slow down Sony’s Playstation
Sony continues to suffer from the chip crisis. Photo: Eugene Hoshiko/AP/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
For Sony, the games division with the Playstation is the largest business area – but it is suffering from the chip crisis. Luckily for the Japanese company, films, music and electronics can compensate for the problems.
Sony continues to be held back by global chip bottlenecks with its Playstation games console. In the past quarter, the Japanese electronics giant was only able to sell two million units of its new Playstation 5 console – after 3.3 million a year earlier.
In the fiscal year ended March, there were only 11.5 million consoles instead of the targeted 14.8 million. The devices have been hard to come by since the market launch in November 2020, as has the new Xbox from competitor Microsoft.
Thanks to the weak yen and further growth in the film and music business, the Sony group as a whole achieved an operating profit of more than one trillion yen for the first time in the past fiscal year. Operating profit rose 25.9 percent to 1.2 trillion yen (8.7 billion euros). The bottom line is that Sony earned 882.18 billion yen, 14.3 percent less than in the previous year. In the current financial year, net profit is likely to fall even further, to 830 billion yen, as Sony announced on Tuesday.
Successful with Spider-Man movie
In the film business, Sony benefited from the reopening of cinemas after corona restrictions and the success of the new Spider-Man film in the past financial year. Sales rose by more than 60 percent to 1.24 trillion yen (around 9 billion euros), and operating profit more than doubled to a good 217 billion yen (almost 1.6 billion euros).
The games division remained Sony’s largest business area with revenues of 2.74 trillion yen (almost 20 billion euros), but growth was only a good three percent. In the current fiscal year, Sony now hopes to be able to increase sales in the area by a third. In addition to music, business with electronic devices and image sensors for smartphones continued to do well.