FinalEvangelion said:
That's about right. About $3-5 from what I remember working retail. They only sell the console to attract customers to buy thinks like controllers, accessories, and HDMI cables (which retailers make massive profit). Shipping costs probably me it closer to $50 per console. At this point, they are probably spending more in promotion and marketing. |
ok.. full stop here. Let's leave guesses out and talk some common sense:
1. Once again USA =/= TheWorld. Consoles in Europe/Everywhere but NA sell as standard electronic consumer goods in the lower/middle price cathegory. Shop margins vary from country to country but you can take an average of 20% in this cathegory as a good estimate (of course shop margins are company secrets and you won't get an answer if you ask). This margin might be considerably higher in Japan as this is (was?) a higher-price country.
2. Shipping costs are almost irrelevant in the equation. A standard shipping container currently costs around $5000 to ship from China to somewhere else. Look up the size of a standard container in the internet and calculate how many 1000s of consoles you can fit into a container. Sony (as a regular mass exporter of electronic goods) probably owns (some of) the containers and some container ships so their costs per container may even be significantly lower.
3. I checked the isupply price breakdown and I like it much better than their first one (which was almost complete and utter bullshit as far as mass manufacturing costs are concerned). They got most of the stuff right (although estimating numbers into the cent range is nonsense). The things that are off are the price of the harddisk (a single platter hd costs around $25 when ordered correctly) and the price of the blu-ray drive is only half of their quote (since they say they don't include royalties in their breakdown. Much of blu-ray drive costs is royalties - some of which Sony might not have to pay).
4. Promotion, marketing and software personnel costs obviously do not go into a manufacturing price breakdowm, so we can say that the current manufacturing costs are around $300-$310 for a PS3 console (an unknown variable is the NVdida chip which is rumoured to have been way,way overpriced but that contract had ended this year and Sony hopefully has a better contract now).
5. How much money does Sony lose per PS3 sold? - that is a very difficult question which depends on the sales area. Marketing, personnel costs, promotional stuff, intercompany costs (you do know that Sony USA/Europe technically buys all the consoles from Sony Japan, don't you?), currency fluctuations turn the equation basically into a coin toss. My guess is that Sony loses heavily in Japan, a little in NA and almost nothing in Europe.
