14 DAY TRIAL // Sony has announced a loss for the second fiscal quarter of the year and lower revenue but overall sales of the PlayStation 3 home gaming console have gone up by 33% because of the price cut that kicked in and because of the better value for money of the new Slim version of the device.
For the quarter that ended on September 30, Sony shipped 3.2 million PS3 consoles compared with the 2.4 million it moved in the same period in 2008. The fresh Slim even broke a record for the company by selling 1 million units in less than three weeks.
Arvind Bhatia, who is an analyst of the videogame market for Stern Agee, said that good PS3 numbers are “positive for the industry, especially in light of Nintendo’s reduced target for Wii hardware sales announced yesterday.”
Still, the overall Networked Products and Services Division, which handles the PS3 sales, has seen revenue drop by about a quarter during the second fiscal quarter, reaching 3.9 billion, while the losses actually grew, reaching 645.40 million dollars. Sony is saying that the reasons for the fall are worse than expected sales of the Vaio PC division and lackluster sales of videogames published by the company.
One big problem it is facing is that the PlayStation 3 numbers are simply not rising quickly enough to replace the loss of revenue brought on by the declining sales of the nine-year-old PlayStation 2 console.
For the whole fiscal year, set to end on March 31, 2010 Sony has said that it now expects to have a loss of 1.04 billion dollars, which is less than the 1.32 billion projected at the beginning of the year. Before that moment, Sony is set to again provide a boost for sales of the PlayStation 3 by introducing the new motion tracking wand controller, slated for a spring release.