NJ5 said:
That's not how a cost/benefit analysis works (if I understood your post correctly). First of all, we can ignore the manufacturing cost reduction of the slim, since that will happen with or without the price cut (it just confuses things to include it). Second, you should only count software and accessories from the PS3 buyers who bought the PS3 because of the price cut, the other buyers would have given that profit with or without the price cut. Two scenarios to explain what I mean: Baseline scenario: No price cut, and Sony sells 9 million PS3s, and getting a certain profit from software/accessory sales. Specific numbers don't matter for a comparison, hence "baseline". Price cut: A $100 price cut halfway through the year, when 4 million PS3s have already been sold. After the price cut, for the rest of the year 9 million PS3s are sold instead of 5 million (for a total of 13 million). So Sony loses $900 million compared to scenario 1 on the hardware side (this is the "cost side" of the analysis). Of course, more software is sold during the fiscal year due to the higher HW sales. Let's take your $80 profit estimate for the year. The additional userbase gained from the price cut is 4 million, which has the benefit of generating 4 million * $80 = $320 million. The $80 from the remaining 9 million is not counted, since that's also in the baseline scenario. As you can see, the difference between the two scenarios is a $580 million loss. Of course there might be some additional savings from raising HW production volume, but that will certainly not eliminate all this loss.
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Your scenario has two problems.
1) You do not allow for market stratification. If they do release the slim at 300 it seems unlikely that they won't also have a "delux" model at a higher price point. Those people who would have bought one anyway, but end up buying the the $400 elite instead are not accounted for.
2) Evidence suggests manufacturing costs more radically than people anticipate. IBM's fab coalition was supposed to have it's 45nm process used in mass production at the end of last year, but there have been repeated delays and 45nm CBE chips are only recently being mass produced.
I suspect Sony had been counting on the new chips being introduced much earlier and has been saving up large board redesigns thinking theres no point to retooling now only to retool again in a few months for the new chips. We are likely to see Sony put move a large number ASICs onto the CPU which should have happened half a year ago.This move from a hogepoge of commodity hardware duct taped together to more customized SoC (system on chip) designs is what tends to be the primary driver of cost reduction in the consumer electronics industry.
Furthermore, this isn't just a die shrink, but also the introduction of high-K metal gates which is supposed to significantly reduce gate leakage. This is almost a pure increase in yields (and hence profit) as opposed to a die shrink.
