Going In The Right Direction

13
May/100

Sony posts another huge annual loss, but PS3 sales are up

Sony just posted its yearly results today, and while a ¥40.8 billion ($439 million) loss is never a good thing, it’s at least a marked improvement from last year’s staggering $1 billion drop into the red, which was the company’s first loss in 14 years. LCD TVs and cameras were Sony’s big electronics sellers, while PS3 sales went up to 13 million from 10.1 million last year — and hey, Sony’s console actually became profitable at the end of the year as production costs have gone down. Now for the bad news: PSP sales were down to 9.9m from 14.4 last year, with game sales dropping to 44.4m from 50.3m units, while PS2 hardware went down to 7.2m from 7.7m units and PS2 software fell sharply from 83.5m units to 35.7m units. That’s not completely unexpected, as the PS2 can’t last forever and the PSP is getting long in the tooth, but it means that Sony faces some serious pressure to hit its target of 15m PS3s sold this year to pick up the slack and help it hit its goal of posting a ¥50 billion ($541 million) profit next year. Let’s hope that Move controller lives up to the hype, right? Sony’s also counting on 3D to help it get there, and wonder of wonders, it also expects Sony Ericsson to hit profitability, so that X10 mini pro had better be a big improvement over the Xperia X10. We’ll see if Sir Howard can keep all these various ships going in the right direction while still keeping the rest of Sony’s diverse operations (like its profitable life insurance business) in line — it should be an interesting year.

Sony posts another huge annual loss, but PS3 sales are up originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 May 2010 17:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tagged as: 2m, 4m, 5m, 9m, Bad News, Electronics Sellers, Engadget, Game Sales, Going In The Right Direction, Joystiq, Life Insurance Business, Ps3, Sir Howard, Slack, Sony Electronics, Sony Ericsson, Target, Wall Street Journal, Xperia, Yen

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8
Feb/100

Google’s Nexus One ‘equipment recovery fee’ slashed to $150, still a pain

So the good news here is that Google appears to have heard the cries for help, having taken a chainsaw to its brutal $350 “equipment recovery fee” that had been lumped on top of T-Mobile’s $200 ETF for subsidized Nexus One contracts canceled in the first 120 days. The bad news, though, is that it still exists at all — a hairy precedent for an industry being watched with eagle eyes by the FCC right now. The company has knocked $200 off the fee, bringing it down to $150; in other words, if you break your contract, you’ll pay the same ETF that Verizon now charges on its “advanced devices.” Whether that was a deliberate move to let ‘em say that they’re no more expensive than Verizon is unclear, but let’s be honest: $350 is extreme, $550 was highway robbery. At least we’re going in the right direction.