Sony's massive initial expenditures for the PlayStation 3 lead to years of losses. This is something that apparently won't be repeated for future platforms.

During an investors briefing today (via Nikkei), Chief Financial Officer Masaru Kato was asked if Sony expects its games division to continue to maintain its recent profitability. Different from the major losses of Sony Group as a whole, the company's games business turned profitable over the fiscal year.

Kato noted that the main factor in the losses for the past few years has been the big difference in sales price and cost for the PS3 system. Sony even spent billions to create its own semi conductor facilities.

This is something that won't happen in the future. The semiconductor business is changing, said Kato. "It is no longer thinkable to have a huge initial financial investment like that of the PS3."

Sony's Network Products & Services division, which overseas the PlayStation business, saw a 0.4% increase in sales to 1,579,300 million yen. Last year's operating loss of 833,000 million yen was turned into an operating profit of 356,000 million yen.

PS3 hardware cost reductions and increased software sales were major factors in the turnaround.

Sony shipped 14.3 million PS3 systems, 8 million PSP systems and 2.64 million PS2 systems over the year. Software shipments were 147,900,000 for PS3, 46,600,000 for PSP and 16,400,000 for PS2.

For the current year, Sony forecasts 15 million PS3 systems, 6 million PSP systems and 4 million PS2 systems.

http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2011/05/27/sony_earnings/

Good :)