"Sony’s earnings from TVs will probably improve by 100 billion yen this business year from a loss of 73 billion yen in the 12 months ended March 31, Oneda said. The loss at the Networked Products and Services Group may narrow, helped by demand for electronic readers, Vaio computers and PlayStation3 games consoles, Sony said.
The company stopped losing money from PS3 consoles in March and will likely post an annual profit of at least 1 billion yen this year from PS3, compared with a loss of about 50 billion yen in the year ended March 31, Oneda said.
Personal computer sales will probably rise to 8.8 million from 6.8 million, Sony said. The company projects sales of 15 million PS3s compared with 13 million sold a year earlier."
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601101&sid=aOiVJ4dZARts
Now let me give you the information that is relevant here:
Oneda says: "The company stopped losing money from PS3 consoles in March and will likely post an annual profit of at least 1 billion yen this year from PS3, compared with a loss of about 50 billion yen in the year ended March 31."
Firstly let us work out what exactly he is saying.. He says that Sony lost 50 billion yen from PS3, does he mean the PS3 on its own lost that amount or is he saying the division that the PS3 is under lost that amount? Well here is the relevant information:
Networked Products & Services (GAME) (Millions of U.S. dollars)
-FY 2009: Operating Income (loss) $(893)
The division that houses the loss contributed by the PS3 made a net operating income loss of $893 million USD. $893 million USD converts to $82.54 billion Yen which is more than Oneda specified the PS3 contributed. One must then assume that the PS3 was entirely responsible for the $50 billion Yen loss he mentioned.
Now that we have that assumption, we can also fairly certainly make the claim that Oneda was also being specific about the PS3 when he said: "The company stopped losing money from PS3 consoles in March and will likely post an annual profit of at least 1 billion yen this year from PS3." So how much money is 1 billion Yen in USD? Well it's $10.82 Million USD.
So Sony expects to make $10.82 Million USD off of 15M PS3's. That means that from now until the end of March 2011, each PS3 sold would make Sony an average of 72 cents...
Interesting, no?
Now consider that Oneda said "PS3" and thus far, I've taken it to mean "PS3 hardware" and not "PS3 platform" as one would expect. To come to the conclusion that Sony are profiting 72 cents per PS3 without taking into account other profitable parts of the PS3 platform like peripherals and games. So one HAS to come to the conclusion that a price cut is on it's way and because I don't want to look deeper into the numbers right now, I'm not going to speculate how much that price cut will be but I'd assume $50 would be the safe bet.
