14 DAY TRIAL // In the last few days, a few of the major players have announced financial results for the fiscal year 2008, which ends on March 31. Electronic Arts surprised commentators with increased sales and revenue but also with some losses, while Sega Sammy, the parent company of Sega, blamed the world economic crisis for its significant losses. Now it's Sony's turn to show the world how it did in 2008.
During the year in question, the entire consortium saw revenues go up to 84.4 billion dollars, which is an increase of almost 7% over the year before, while profits followed the same trend, going from 1.20 billion to around 3.5 billion dollars.
Because Sony is a big company that is concerned with more than creating game consoles and videogames, it is worth mentioning that most of the increase was powered by the electronics division of the company, which signaled that products like LCD Bravia television sets, Vaio PCs and digital cameras from the Cybershot line were the main contributors to the improved results.
The games division did not do nearly as well. Sales are looking better than in the previous year, with an overall value of 12.2 billion dollars. It seems that the continued growth of the videogame market, in spite of the continued economic crisis, meant that PlayStation 3 sales went up, taking the games division up with them. Because the PS3 sold more and because more games came to the platform games sales also helped the division see losses go down significantly, from 2.2 billion dollars to a more manageable 1.18 billion dollars.
Let's no forget the sales figures for the main Sony produced consoles. The PlayStation 3 pushed around 5.6 million consoles in fiscal 2008, for a total of 9.24 million overall. PlayStation Portable sales jumped to around 13.9 million, while the PlayStation 2 is still going strong, with a drop of just under a million consoles in sales numbers, for a total of 13.73 million consoles. The company also managed to sell roughly 58 million PS3 games, some 55.5 million PSP games and more than 150 million PS2 games.
While the above numbers are impressive, it seems that the numbers for next year will dwarf them, both in hardware and in software. The only downturn will be in the PS2 division, mainly because of the fact that the console is becoming less and less attractive, but Sony expects rising PS3 sales to compensate for that.