Sony released its financial report for the third quarter of fiscal 2021. Thanks to the strong performance of film and television, music, semiconductor, and financial businesses, its sales revenue reached 3,031.3 billion yen ($26.4 billion), a year-on-year increase of 13%. The company’s operating profit for the quarter was 465.2 billion yen ($4 billion). Excluding one-off factors such as equity interests, asset write-downs, and COVID-19 fund expenditures (this fiscal year and the previous fiscal year), operating profit for the quarter increased by 15% year-on-year. However, the Sony PS5 sale is quite good in terms of operating profit.
The entire Sony Game and network service have sales of 813.3 billion yen ($7.1 billion), down 8% year on year. The decline was mainly due to the decline in hardware and peripheral sales, the decline in sales of non-first-party games (including in-app purchases), and the sales of first-party games. However, the operating profit of the game and network services segment increased by 121 billion yen ($1 billion). This is mainly due to the losses from the Sony PS5 selling below cost price and the reduction of sales management expenses.
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In addition, Sony lowered its fiscal 2021 sales forecast for its Games and Network Services segment due to lower-than-expected Sony PS5 sales. As of December 31, 2021, PS5 has sold a total of 17.2 million units. In the third quarter of the fiscal year, Sony PS4 sold 200,000 units, Sony PS5 sold 3.9 million units, and games sold 92.7 million copies (11.3 million first-party games). The digital version of the game accounts for 62%. Sony PS+ membership has 48 million subscribers and 111 million monthly active users.
Sony’s sales started strong and thinned out
As of June last year, the cumulative sales of the Sony PS5 game consoles in Japan exceeded 400,000 units. After the first 17 weeks of PS5 sales (digital and optical disc versions), its performance was promising. According to market records, the Sony PS5 sales in Japan have been growing steadily. Its weekly sales volume is about 33,000 units, which is a 35% increase from last week. Weekly sales volume shows an upward trend for the third consecutive week. The sales of the standard version of PS5 increased by 40% to 30,117 units, and the digital version increased by 6% to 3,721 units.
It is also worth mentioning that Sony’s previous-generation game console PS4 still has a certain sales volume. Sales of PS4 series models (including PS4 Pro) in Japan also increased by 9% to 3,217 units. While the standard version of PS4 sales increased by 9% to 3,201 units, the PS4 Pro 4K playback version increased by 14% to 16 units.
