Sony has revealed that the $499 PlayStation 5 model including the disc drive is no longer selling at a loss. The news was announced by Sony CFO Hiroki Totoki during the company’s financial briefing which took place last Wednesday. As for the $399 Digital Edition of the PS5, Totoki stated that other hardware sales like peripherals and the PlayStation 4, have offset the loss.
As noted by Bloomberg, Sony improved upon its yearly operating profit, earning 980 billion yen ($8.99 billion) as compared to 930 billion yen last year. Sony’s shares have also increased by 7.7% this year after rising 39% last year.
“Better camera sales are helping offset part of the concern for image sensors being hit by the loss of revenue from smartphone handset clients,” said SBI Securities analyst Yoshiharu Izumi after the earnings call. “The focus so far has been on the group’s entertainment assets such as games and anime, but the first-quarter result confirmed its traditional electronics hardware business remains solid.”
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The report noted that with the rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine in many parts of the world, work-life seems to be going back to normal. While there’s still some uncertainty, Sony expects to see increased revenue from film and TV show production, as well as licensing fee revenues. An increased revenue was also seen in the music streaming and electronics sections.
PlayStation Plus subscribers have dropped from 47.6 million in the last quarter to 46.3 million, with the monthly active users falling to 104 million from 109 million. However, Sony is still on track to achieve its goal of selling over 14.8 million PlayStation 5 units this fiscal year.
“Going forward, Sony will be selling every single PS5 it puts into markets in a matter of seconds. Therefore, a challenge is not generating demand, but supply,” said industry analyst Serkan Toto. “On software, Covid-19 is affecting production and so many big titles that would drive hardware sales and PlayStation network subscribers got delayed to next year.”
After almost 8 months since the launch of the PlayStation 5, owners can finally install extra internal storage. You can check out our list of best SSDs for the PlayStation 5 if you’re planning to get one.
