Kotaku: Yo, Sony? Why you no first?

[Mr Khan]

Dodece said:
@outlawauron

It is fairly easy to be profitable when you hide your losses behind massive gutting. Sorry the politically correct thing to say would be comprehensive restructuring via selling off assets to facilitate cash flow into future development. In a nutshell Sony five years ago, and before was selling off large chunks of their portfolio, and taking out massive loans. I did the math a few years back, and Sony had literally set aside five billion dollars for their loss leading strategy with the PS3. Which as it turns out wasn't anywhere near enough when they had to drop the retail price twice in the first year to keep the console alive.

Anyway Sony looked good five years ago, because they had just sold billions of dollars of assets which obviously don't have overhead. It wasn't that they were really making profit off their business. They just threw a garage sale, but they were still coming up short at their day job. Sony has had problems for about a decade. When Stringer came on board the order of the day was selling assets to cover losses.

Just a few links to provide proof for my assertions.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/76590-Sony-Sells-Financial-Stake-to-Fund-Games-Unit

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ac.REUfeFG9Q

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/02/23/BUGESHCVKC1.DTL

http://www.bizjournals.com/pittsburgh/stories/2006/12/04/daily32.html

Interesting read. We often hear that the PS division is "the one working part of Sony" or something like that (really their bread and butter seems to be Columbia-Tristar/Pictures Television/BGM at this point), but this helps show how SCE's missteps have hurt Sony as a whole.