Aha... took me a while before I realised this was before tax and such, I didn'trecognise the figures.

wow, great find

Acording to the historical fiscal reports... the first time Sony seperated it's gaming division was actually fiscal year 1998 (ending March 31st 1998)

but their reports give graphs with back-dated figures for the 4 years previous..... although for the game section it was only 3 previous years, and also limited information about the actual profits of the division before 1998 (all I can find is "sales" which means revenue.... so I don't know how the OP got the operating profit figures for 1996 or 1997.

Here is the archive of old fiscal reports:
http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/IR/financial/ar/Archive.html

The older files are huge by the way, 12MB for the 1996 file!

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Edit: I took these interesting graphs from the 1998 report, (ignore the numbers on the bottom right I was working something out) but I can't figure out what I should be doing to find operating profits



The top graph shows a percentage breakdown of operating revenue, while the bottom is the total company profit/loss... but you can't really use the percentages to or revenue to work out the percentages of profit, because profit can be negative.

The most serious theory I've ever seen about Roswell was Futurama episode "Roswell that ends well"

About MS balance sheets: no theory, like many, I'd like to know a little bit less vaguely where losses accounted for in "Corporate level activity" come from. I asked a question and you put answers in my mouth? Anyhow, vague balance item apart, MS balances are public, so everybody can read them, see how divisions were organized in the past and their profits or losses, etc. and see that Windows, Office, IIS and services have always been cash cows across the years, while every other product and division, well, let's simply say, not always (and I could have been much more malicious if I were a fanboy).

@Kasz216

Try looking at bottom the post where I put my sources. (maybe I should make it more noticable)

@TWRoO

You weren't looking hard enough. I know, it's hard to find isn't it? Besides there's this handy little excel sheet "Consolodated Historical Data" from sony that has it layed out on one page. (Read my sources to find out what I'm talking about)

I realize now the direct link to the excel file died (I'll fix it soon) but the link leading to that one was still working.

@Bitmap Frogs

No, but you can do a chart adjested for inflation. It just doesn't seem very usefull to me. Current data isn't very useful as it is anyways to be honest.

I'll probably start a new thread soon anyway because Sony is going to change their games segment over to Networked Products & Services Group and I guess their reports will reflect that. (Which the isn't in the thread title.)

Sarcasm?

Anyhow, tanks for the link, but I can't open it in Works spreadsheet (I don't have excel) but thanks to you I don't need to anyway.

Sony too changing divisions' names? MICROSOFT IS CONTAGIOUS! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!     

@TWRoO: Check out OpenOffice suite. Very useful and is freeware.

That episode won an Emmy, by the way. Always in everyone's top 5 episodes, a true classic.

Anyways, you were implying MS was using the overhead expenses to hide X360 related losses, which is kind of conspirational-ly. Sony also has overhead expenses, Nintendo has overhead expenses. Assuming just because it is Microsoft it must be doing something fishy falls within the realms of tin-foil hattery.

Here's some data for Sega too. I forget the source of the PDF I copied this from.