The winner for hardware revenue in December is.....Sony

[Gazz]

@DKII: fair enough, lets say they actually loose money on the PS3 at this very moment (past numbers set aside for the sake of argument) since it very likely they do. Unfortunatly there is 0.0 real evidence in the form of official numbers, but I agree with you, they must loose on their consoles. How much do they loose on a unit and how much do they make on others. Do they at all? Does high revenue immediatly equal high losses or do potential wins on PSP and PS2 make up for it?

I adknowledge your argument, if Sony loses a lot of money on the PS3 then high revenue means high losses like someone of Sony once said himself if memory serves me right. The argument just holds no ground if losses on the PS3 are small and Sony makes a decent profit on the PS2 and PSP.

@ Bdbdbd and Sullla: I never said that Sony didn't invest in R&d. It's just possible that Sony already invested a load of money in previous quarters (nice taxes trick I might add) into research and now simply don't have to invest that much anymore. Speculative you say? Ofcourse it is, but it isn't very unlikely. I just noticed FishyJoe mentioning that Sony has a bad track record for making realistic projections. Is that speculative? Yes, ofcourse. Assuming that a company does something based on previous behaviour, where that same company has also shown many examples of doing the exact opposite is as speculative as hell.

That just leaves my speculation on what Sony did to make a 2 billion loss last year. Most of that money was spend on getting sufficient supplies for the PS3. Let's assume that Sony made just 1.5 million consoles with a manufacturing price around 800 dollars. That alone already makes up for 1.2000.000 dollars. Add gamedevelopment, R&D, producing the new PSP (they were already busy with those then), advertising and so on. There have also been numerous rumors that the losses made by Blu-ray were thrown in to the game division.

I think we are going to see some pretty good figures from Sony this time around. They are most likely to make a loss this time around, but I think they are starting to turn around profitwise and this may have been one of the last bad financial figures we'll see from them in a long time