Sony Corp., maker of the PlayStation console, said the growing popularity of games on Apple Inc.’s iPhone and iPad isn’t a threat to its games business.
“It’s something that will lead to broadening the customer base of the overall game industry,” Kazuo Hirai, president of Sony’s Networked Products & Services Group, said in an interview in Chiba prefecture, near Tokyo, today. “People who had never played a game before may enjoy it on their iPhone or Android cell phone and may want to play more at their home.”
Sony earlier this year updated its PS3 software to allow users of the machines to run games in 3-D as part of a plan to earn profit in its game business amid competition from mobile phones. Shipments of game-capable mobile phones are set to rise 11.4 percent to 1.27 billion this year, researcher iSuppli said last month.
Demand for video-game consoles may be little changed at 52.3 million and shipments of portable units may drop 2.5 percent to 38.9 million, the El Segundo, California-based researcher said.
Sony will be selling the “Move” controller, resembling Nintendo Co.’s Wii motion-sensing wand with a colored ball at the top, in the U.S. and Europe this month and in Japan in October. Sony is also offering new game titles such as Gran Turismo 5, which can be played in 3-D format, to stimulate consumer demand.
The company started offering 3-D game titles that can be downloaded through the Internet in June, when it also began selling Bravia 3-D televisions.
Apple Game Center
Sony rose 1.7 percent to close at 2,641 yen in Tokyo trading, compared with a 0.1 percent decline by the benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average.
Apple, based in Cupertino, California, has shipped more than 120 million devices that run its iOS operating system, including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The company earlier this month added a Game Center feature to the operating system that offers multiplayer games .
Mobile phones on which users can potentially play games made up 93 percent of all games hardware in 2009, while consoles accounted for 3 percent, according to iSuppli. Still, handhelds had a 67.1 percent share of the worldwide games software market in 2009 with the rest for mobile phones.
PlayStation 3 sales in Japan, Europe, the U.S. and Asia have been robust, though in line with the company’s expectations at the beginning of the fiscal year, Hirai said. Sony is “very confident” to make the game business profitable in the current fiscal year, which ends in March, he said.
Sony stopped losing money on PS3 consoles in March and recorded 500 million yen ($5.8 million) of profit from game operations in the three months ended June 30, Hirai said.
Sony will likely post an annual profit of at least 1 billion yen from game operations this fiscal year, compared with a loss of about 57 billion yen in the year ended March 31, the company said in May.
Source Bloomberg.com
