Sony admits PSPs will not fly off shelves, says phones and PS3s will
Single-purpose devices down all round for troubled giant
Sony has said that it doesn't think it will be able to sell as many of its portable game devices - PSP and Vita - as it had hoped.
In August, the Japanese electronics firm said it reckoned it could shift 12 million game devices this fiscal year, but it reduced its forecast to 10 million in its quarterly earnings announcement today. Much of the sales will be expected over the Christmas period, since Sony has only sold three million so far.
Sony also cut its sales forecast for TVs by a million to 14.5 million and lopped two million off its expectations for compact digital cameras to 16 million. But the company is hoping that its new phones and PlayStations can hold steady, shipping 34 and 16 million respectively.
Net loss eased at the firm in the quarter ending in September, down to ¥15.5bn (£120m, $194m), from ¥27bn (£209m, $337m) last year on a modest operating income of ¥30.3bn (£234m, $379m). But the gains were helped by a ¥13.2bn (£102m, $165m) windfall from insurance companies on damages from the floods in Thailand and ¥8.2bn (£63.5m, $102.5m) made from the sale of a chemical products business.
Sony is still hoping for an operating profit of ¥130bn (£1bn, $1.65bn) for the full year, but the news still made a 4 per cent dent in its share price.
Fellow Japanese electronics firm Panasonic was hit much harder on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, sliding over 19 per cent after it forecast a net loss of ¥765bn (£5.9bn, $9.6bn) for the fiscal year.
The huge loss is down to restructuring costs, which are now expected to be over 10 times more than the firm previously thought. Its earlier forecast loss was just ¥50bn (£387m, $625m). ®
COMMENTS
Who needs a portable games console these days, when your cheap Android smartphone provides a similar experience at zero marginal cost? App store games are much cheaper than PSP games too.
Re: LOL
believing things should be cheaper != thinking they should be free
As for using standard cards Nintendo seem to have found a way of doing it with SD cards. Sony's inability to do the same really should not be our problem.
The decline is staggering indeed, unless Sony is willing to do what Nintendo did with the 3DS then the VITA is doomed like the PSP-GO. Tablet gaming is becoming a more viable option, but the real profit and money for the game devs still come from their sales of games on 3DS'es and VITA's. My opinion handheld consles in the near future only attract the hardcore gamers, for example Neo-Geo owners.
And proprietary memory formats. I refuse to pay £60 for a 32gig memory card when I can get a 64gig microSD card for less than that.
Hell I can get a 32gig UHS-1 memory card for £20
Here's a thought - if they want to sell more vitas then why not give customers what they really want: cheaper consoles.
Instead of which they bring out pointless new colour schemes...
