Sony will know how much it cost to make x-thousand PS3s quite accurately.

However, Sony have spent money this year on reducing the size of the cell/RSX, upgrading production facilities, new controller designs, advertising etc.  those are one-off costs, and most wouldn't be considered in the price to make a ps3.

So, I'd guess the PS3 probably costs less than $400 per unit to manufacture, but the PS3 is unlikely to make sony a direct profit in the direct future.

Retailer cut, transport costs, etc exists everywhere in the world.

So removing an average 20% tax for Europe to be fair, we get:

400$ for the US

330€ for Europe = 480$ (I made a mistake in my last post)

Anyway, I was trying to point that if the PS3 costs 400$ to produce (as many claimed), Sony is not losing money in Others.

(To me, transport costs are part of the cost of production. I have absolutely no idea about how much the retailer cut can be, but I assume it's less than 20%)

^ Retail margins are higher in Europe than US, but 20% is probably a decent ballpark figure.

Anyway, assuming average EU VAT of 20%, and retail margin of 20% would put Sony's price at €278 or $407.

Assuming a slightly lower US retail margin of 15% would result in Sony's price at $348.

PS3 almost certainly loses less money in EU than US, although much of this is due to exchange rate fluctuations, or more specifically the weak US dollar.

Of course there is still additional costs such as shipping, distribution, import tax etc, but those probably don't add a significant amount, maybe 5%, but higher fuel and labour costs would probably mean this is slightly higher in EU than US.

PS3 is probably close to breaking even in EU, but still losing a significant amount in US. Japan is probably somewhere in between.

The % is on brutto not netto. So its 333 € thats about 490$.

But you also have to consider some more points. Higher retailer margin, higher costs (more languages/country/shops) and warranty (by default 2 years in E.U.).

Stringer (Sony CEO): "We are already making more money with the games than we are losing with the hardware."

Recent interview with German news outlet Welt Online.

Not true, there are dozens of people at Sony who know. Sadly, they are not telling anyone :(.

Which means that they're losing less than the licencing fees of their average weekly tie-ratio worth of games (roughly 4.5 games) and their average weeks worth of first party software sales ... That puts the upper limit at around $50 to $75 and since he admits the hardware is losing money the lower limit is $0.

@ HappySquirriel

It means taking VGChartz data (15th of August), if correct.

Profits from 1,158,614 PS3 software sales a week (higher margins from Sony published titles) are bigger than loses generated by 134,333 PS3 hardware sales a week. Ratio games to consoles ~8.62.

This ratio will improve further down the PS3's lifecycle due to a growing number of already installed PS3 userbase vs new PS3 sales, people already owning PS3s have had more time to build up their software collection.

Hardware costs will go down, average software sales per week will go up. Things are looking good this year and for the long run.