Sony Year-end/4Q Financials

[Carl B]

chief actually SONY counts sold as units which are shipped to retail ON ARRIVAL and not on TRANSIT. also the thing that EVERYONE is ignoring is the fact the production cost of BLU RAY diodes fell in MARCH as well. So PP of ps3s went down anyway in march

No one is talking about sold, shipped, or anything else; when a single unit is manufactured, whether or not it is sold or shipped, it goes on the books. If it goes on as an asset with less value than what it took to manufacture, that is a loss. If it actually sells for less than what it was inventoried at (think price drop on the fats), then that is a further loss recorded later. But to me, saying that PS3's turned profitable on a hardware level, means that the consoles being manufactured in March were non-lossy; not related to what was in retail at that moment, or on ships, or anything else other than what was emerging from factories.

By the way, can you stop randomly capitalizing words?

 

[Titanio]

Well, now that sources have been posted, I accept those numbers. Still, I find it a bit troubling operating on this double standard. Does MS not give separate comments on it's game division in conference calls? Or do people just not bother to track those down and publicize them like we are doing for Sony?

I'm not sure, but if there's significant discrepancies, they should be rooted out and highlighted if possible. I think a lot of people - understandably - are 'lazy' about looking too much beyond headline numbers.

I think in the case of this quarter, it's the first time such a discrepancy between NPS and SCE was so obvious, the first time we saw how wildly they could diverge. We didn't have any indication of that before, AFAIK.

Also, separate game business numbers are not meant to be officially provided. They do officially provide revenue numbers for Game, but not operating income or net profit or anything. During the overseas investor call someone asked for specific operating income numbers for Game, and they were declined, but I guess during the Japanese call or during a Q+A Oneda was a little more loose.

I don't think there should be any double standard - I think when dealing with either MS home entertainment numbers or Sony's NPS numbers there should be recognition that these aren't accurate reflections of either Xbox or SCE. I think people have made assumptions about their closeness, but those assumptions may not be sound.

Even better, actual numbers. 4 million consoles at -$200 each is -$800 million for the hardware sold in Q1 & Q2. Total recorded losses were $1 billion. Thus sales of software, PS2, PSP, etc. amounted to -$200 million!!

NPS loss for those two quarters was ~1bn.

I have significant doubts in light of Sony's comments about profitability for the FY among the various segments of NPS that SCE accounted for all of this number. For the full year, $75m+ of NPS' loss, at least, has nothing to do with SCE (given the Q4 numbers). From reports quoted above it sounds like the SCE loss for the year was more like ~$540m ('50bn Yen').

If that figure for the year is correct for the games business, then the loss in those two quarter was probably more like 600m, maybe 700m tops (assuming small profit in Q3/Q4).

During the overseas call they discussed the aspects of the game business wrt profitability. PSP and PS2 are both positive, but are declining. PS3 is obviously a negative. PSN...I don't think they said if it was a positive or negative contributor, just that they wanted to improve profitability. Then R&D, specifically 'future platform' R&D was the last factor they thought was notable, which is obviously a negative. Perhaps an increasing one as the generation wears on.

Shuffle those factors, and the numbers - at least that 50bn yen one - start to seem more plausible/believable.

 

[Carl B]

PSN...I don't think they said if it was a positive or negative contributor, just that they wanted to improve profitability.

It was negative; they had a goal of profitability for PSN which they failed to meet, but hope to this year.

 

[boommoob1]

Even better, actual numbers. 4 million consoles at -$200 each is -$800 million for the hardware sold in Q1 & Q2. Total recorded losses were $1 billion. Thus sales of software, PS2, PSP, etc. amounted to -$200 million!!

If losses on the hardware were 800M, the recorded losses for those quarters should have been much, much less. What are Sony spending their money on?

I've already posted this.

Last year included a one time write-down on inventory because of the price-cut to phats when the slim was released. They were supposed to be mostly sold out, but they weren't and Sony had to write off around $300m in lost earnings.

Last year included a one time write-down on inventory because of the price-cut to phats when the slim was released. They were supposed to be mostly sold out, but they weren't and Sony had to write off around $300m in lost earnings. http://forum.blu-ray.com/blu-ray-gam...es-target.html

 

[phenix]

Fiscal Year/Business Division/Revenue/Operating income (mil $)
2005/ Game/ 6,821/ 404
2006/ Game/ 8,193/ 75
2007/ Game/ 8,617/ -1,969
2008/ Game/ 12,842/ -1,245
2009/ Game/ 10,746/ -597
2010/ Networked Devices/ 16,945/ -893
Total / 64,164/ -4,225







Game > Playstation, PSP
Networked Devices > Playstation, PSP, VIAO, Walkman

 

[deepbrown]

It was negative; they had a goal of profitability for PSN which they failed to meet, but hope to this year.

Could you explain how PSN could be losing money? They make millions of dollars on Home costumes...where exactly do you lose money other than servers?

 

[RobertR1]

Could you explain how PSN could be losing money? They make millions of dollars on Home costumes...where exactly do you lose money other than servers?

what?

Datacenter costs, per facility. Ofcourse due to a world wide deployment, you might (should!) have multiple centers:
- servers
- routers
- firewalls
- switches
- loan balancing applicances
- bandwith costs
- power and cooling
- software licensing
- on site redundancies
- facilities costs

DR planning:
Double the datacenter cost for each additional hot site

Personnel:
Dev team
Production team
QA team
Server support
Network support
Desktop support/helpdesk
Hardware/software/facilities
telecom solution
Management and excutive team

I could go into much more depth about datacenter and infrastructure costs as well.

 

[deepbrown]

what?

Datacenter costs, per facility. Ofcourse due to a world wide deployment, you might (should!) have multiple centers:
- servers
- routers
- firewalls
- switches
- loan balancing applicances
- bandwith costs
- power and cooling
- software licensing
- on site redundancies
- facilities costs

DR planning:
Double the datacenter cost for each additional hot site

Personnel:
Dev team
Production team
QA team
Server support
Network support
Desktop support/helpdesk
Hardware/software/facilities
telecom solution
Management and excutive team

I could go into much more depth about datacenter and infrastructure costs as well.

Of course, I knew about Dev team and the majority of all of that (I'm not a plonker) - but PSN is making millions upon millions, I just didn't see it as a loss making service from the amount of content it sells. I'm still not convinced it is; from what I've read it sounds like the service didn't make as much money as they had forecast, but not that it was making a loss. I've yet to see one quotation or figure proving so, so if somebody would make the effort to dig that up I'd be grateful.

 

[AzBat]

It was negative; they had a goal of profitability for PSN which they failed to meet, but hope to this year.

Queue subscription fees. Just more proof why the games industry is changing to more of a service-based business model.

Tommy McClain

 

[patsu]

what?

Datacenter costs, per facility. Ofcourse due to a world wide deployment, you might (should!) have multiple centers:
- servers
- routers
- firewalls
- switches
- loan balancing applicances
- bandwith costs
- power and cooling
- software licensing
- on site redundancies
- facilities costs

DR planning:
Double the datacenter cost for each additional hot site

Personnel:
Dev team
Production team
QA team
Server support
Network support
Desktop support/helpdesk
Hardware/software/facilities
telecom solution
Management and excutive team

I could go into much more depth about datacenter and infrastructure costs as well.

Those things belong to a different business unit starting April. Bravia, SOE, Sony Pictures, and friends all need servers.

Also they failed to reach the target profitability, but are they losing money for PSN ?

 

[Carl B]

I've yet to see one quotation or figure proving so, so if somebody would make the effort to dig that up I'd be grateful.

Ok now in terms of effort, didn't I point out that at 1:04 on the conference call the questions get fielded and answered? I mean I'm not just synthesizing this stuff, it's what's on the call. As to how it's losing money, per the answer because they missed their content sales/download targets.

I think that there has to be more of a willingness to listen to these calls and have an organic understanding of what is going on rather than a culture of dependence on reading quotes and such either on blogs, via articles, or through other members/GAF/what have you. I am the first to admit that the calls are generally arduous and boring, and I guess it's a remnant of when I used to write articles on the financials that I still do listen to them every quarter. (but listen I do!)

Anyway for these purposes right now I went back to the conference call to get the exact timestamp: from 1:05:50 to 1:06:24, the question on PSN is answered, and all I can say is that they feel they need to "do a little bit more to turn profitable."

 

[JPT]

As for PSN and Datacenters, doesn't PSN use Akamai CDN? And do they then need a multiple datacenters worldwide, at least I assume that their usage of a CDN should let them get away with fewer datacenters?

 

[Crossbar]

There is also one more cost reduction planned for this financial year which should see the release of the CECH-220x, not sure what is planned for it,....

Where does this information come from?

 

[habbe]

As for PSN and Datacenters, doesn't PSN use Akamai CDN? And do they then need a multiple datacenters worldwide, at least I assume that their usage of a CDN should let them get away with fewer datacenters?

For static content they can rely on any CDN but for other services like payment and user login i think they have there own servers (which of course can be outsourced to datacenter/os/application providers) . We have some customers that use CDN providers for there frontend but the backend servers/os/application is maintained by us.

In my point of view CDN is no more than a cache cloud (haven't seen or design solutions with other than cache function in CDN), but the services provided by the CDN providers are changing rapidly.

 

[deepbrown]

Ok now in terms of effort, didn't I point out that at 1:04 on the conference call the questions get fielded and answered? I mean I'm not just synthesizing this stuff, it's what's on the call. As to how it's losing money, per the answer because they missed their content sales/download targets.

I think that there has to be more of a willingness to listen to these calls and have an organic understanding of what is going on rather than a culture of dependence on reading quotes and such either on blogs, via articles, or through other members/GAF/what have you. I am the first to admit that the calls are generally arduous and boring, and I guess it's a remnant of when I used to write articles on the financials that I still do listen to them every quarter. (but listen I do!)

Anyway for these purposes right now I went back to the conference call to get the exact timestamp: from 1:05:50 to 1:06:24, the question on PSN is answered, and all I can say is that they feel they need to "do a little bit more to turn profitable."

A call includes discussion, discussion can be turned into written text, written text is needed in a forum where its medium is...text. Just saying it's the case doesn't make it so. Requiring quotations isn't only justified, it's essential (I spent a long time providing sources for all my claims others should do the same.) Where does one listen to this call?

 

[Carl B]

A call includes discussion, discussion can be turned into written text, written text is needed in a forum where its medium is...text. Just saying it's the case doesn't make it so. Requiring quotations isn't only justified, it's essential (I spent a long time providing sources for all my claims others should do the same.) Where does one listen to this call?

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/info/presen/index.html

Bottom of page, via the conference call link.

 

[larrylain]

iSupply and Nikkei both will be publishing reports on PS3 PP soon . I hope it will clear away any confusion. I read in a singapore based gaming mag that PS3's PP would shrink to as low as 240$ based on the 40nm RSX and reduction in PP of Blu-ray diodes. That mag also speculated that we could see decent BD ROMs/BD players for as low as 50$ /100$ starting from JUNE.

i am searching for the source but i am very convinced that i read somewhere where it stated that BD DROMs in the ps3s would cost around 50$ each from the beginning of q1,2010, because of the reduction in the PP of the diodes. I will post the source as soon as i find it


OOOOPS


here it is :

http://www.psu.com/news/7617


BD rom costs just as low as 50$ to make as opposed to 100$ in 2009.so yes ps3 is making a decent profit if i am not wrong on the HARDWARE front

 

[larrylain]

again,

i am posting the link for anyone having confusion

http://www.psu.com/news/7617


ORIGINAL SOURCE : http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20090619PD204.html


I think PP of PS3 has been slashed to as much as 75$ compared to late 2009. I guess all confusions could also be laid to rest now

 

[deepbrown]

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/info/presen/index.html

Bottom of page, via the conference call link.

Thank you kindly =)

 

[boommoob1]

Sonys problem is they've got some dodgy TV exec in charge of them. There internal problems were transforming to the digital age and of course a software focus. Most Sony top execs/management knew this. The thinking was an 'outsider' would be better suited to do the job and make the hard decisions in a strict corporate Japan. But all they've had is a bit of a clown who is way out of his depth. Kutaragi and a large number of others should of got the job who could've done that job eventually and delivered the hit products that is there DNA. I'm actually 'dreading' who Stringer will recommend for the job, Hirai and the like?. Give it back to the Engineer geniuses.