14 DAY TRIAL // iSuppli, a market analysis firm, has estimated that Sony, the Japanese console manufacturer and videogame publisher, is making a loss of 32.37 dollars for every Slim console it sells to an interested gamer.
The company is estimating that each device costs Sony 336.37 dollars for the version featuring the 120 GB hard drive, but the retail price in North America is 299. The gap is at its lowest point in history and iSuppli is saying that during the coming year, Sony will begin making a profit on the hardware itself.
Andrew Rassweiler, who is an analyst for iSuppli, has stated that “Since the introduction of the PlayStation 3 in late 2006, Sony has subsidized the price of every console sold, a deficit the company has made up for with game sales and royalties. However, with each new revision of the game console hardware, Sony has aggressively designed out costs to reach the hardware and manufacturing breakeven point as quickly as possible.”
At the moment, the priciest component in a PlayStation 3 Slim is the Blu-ray drive, which is estimated to be about 66 dollars. When the gaming console was released in late 2006, another iSupply estimate pointed to the same piece of hardware as the reason for the high initial price tag put by the maker on the platform.
The release of the Slim and the price cut that accompanied it allowed Sony to beat the Xbox 360 from Microsoft in sales in the NPD Group numbers for three months. During November, the PlayStation 3 Slim managed to post a significant increase over the same period of last year but fell behind the Xbox 360 again. A strong line up in early 2010, including games likes God of War III, Heavy Rain, Final Fantasy XIII and Gran Turismo 5, will probably put the PS3 ahead again.