14 DAY TRIAL // Sony has announced that the distribution duties for the PlayStation 3 home gaming console, which were handled by Sony Computer Entertainment, will be handled by the main company from now on as all the hardware distribution operations will be brought under one roof in order to save money and improve efficiency.
A Bloomberg report cites spokeswoman Mami Imada as saying that distribution costs are set to increase by as much as 50% over the course of 2010 after the figure actually dropped about 25% in 2009 to 1.6 billion dollars, which is the equivalent of 150 billion Yen.
Sony is not saying how much it will be saving by bringing the distribution of the PlayStation 3 into the main company business. Tighter integration might also help it sell the gaming console together with one of the many TV models it manufactures, especially as it aims to introduce 3D gaming in the coming years. In the November 2009 NPD figures, the PlayStation 3 sold less than the Xbox 360 from Microsoft but saw a significant increase over the same period in 2008.
Sony fired close to 20,000 employees in the year that has passed and projects a loss of about 1 billion dollars for the fiscal 12 months, which end in March. It has implemented a tough program that aims to limit losses but the results are not clear yet.
The gaming division, which manufactures the PlayStation 3 and creates titles like Uncharted 2 and God of War III for it, is projected to become profitable by the end of March 2011. At the moment, independent sources are saying that Sony is still losing money for each of the gaming consoles it sells but that the situation will probably change during 2010 as the price of components goes down.