Quarterly figures
Sony raises forecast despite moderate Playstation production
Sony expects the growth in the film and music business to continue over the course of the fiscal year. Photo: Andrej Sokolow / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
The Playstation 5 has been on the market for almost a year – and difficult to get due to component bottlenecks. The manufacturer Sony still earns well thanks to the music business, among other things.
In the global shortage of chips, Sony is still unable to significantly increase production of its new Playstation 5.
In the past quarter, the Japanese group sold 3.3 million units of its new game console after 2.3 million in the previous three months. The Playstation 5 has been hard to come by since it was launched around a year ago.
Even if Sony cannot fully exploit the potential in the games business because of this, thanks to good business in the music and film sectors, among other things, the group raised its profit forecast for the financial year that runs until the end of March.
Sony now expects a profit of 730 billion yen (5.5 billion euros). Compared to the previous year, this would still be a decrease of 29.1 percent. In August Sony had assumed a profit of 700 billion yen.
The games division is still the largest Sony division. Thanks to the Playstation 5, it increased sales by a good 27 percent to 645.6 billion yen (4.9 billion euros) in the second quarter of fiscal year ended at the end of September. The operating result of the division fell however by a good fifth to around 82 billion yen (622 million euros), because Sony sells the new console as usual below the production costs.
Success thanks to the streaming boom
As the owner of a music company and a song publisher, Sony is benefiting from the current streaming boom. Streaming revenues alone jumped 44 percent year-on-year to 113.3 billion yen (860 million euros). As a producer of content for TV and video streaming, Sony made 87 billion yen in sales (660 million euros) – around 71 percent more than a year earlier.
Sony expects that the growth in the film and music business will continue in the further course of the financial year. In the first half of the current fiscal year, Sony’s net profit decreased by 34.8 percent compared to the same period last year to 424.9 billion yen. Sales rose 13.7 percent to 4.6 trillion yen.