Many have expected Sony to have at the very least, a really bad start to the year considering how diabolical their Q4 2011 financial report was. Nobody should have known this better than Sony, however, the financial report of Q1 2012 turned out considerably worse than even the company itself had foresaw.
At total loss of a staggering $312 million was recorded for Q1 2012 (April 1st – June 30th 2012) which spanned a variety of Sony’s divisions. The majority of their divisions managed to turn a large loss apart from two divisions.
Helping Sony to pull some amount of money in, the camera division and the music division managed to turn a profit respectably within their own divisions, which of course was not enough to prevent a large dent from appearing in the entire company’s financials.
What’s more worrying though is that their film division, television division, mobile division and gaming division all managed to make a loss.
The gaming division incurred a $45 million loss alone, which has been blamed in some part by the Playstation Vita’s lackluster sales not being enough to help combat the inevitable Playstation 3 and PSP sales decrease.
In another twist, Sony appear to be rather concerned for the sales of the Playstation Vita, having been unwilling to share the actual statistics for Vita sales and instead, combining PSP and Vita sales into one category. It’s worth noting however that the same was done for Playstation 3 and Playstation 2 systems, and may be more of a coincidence than an outright refusal to share the statistics.
Having had such a substantial loss, higher than the company had expected, they have also had to revise their forecast for the fiscal year, with the being left in a rather awkward position, which was referred to as a “severe operating environment”.
“We have downwardly revised our consolidated results forecast for the current fiscal year, anticipating a severe operating environment from the second quarter onward resulting from uncertain foreign exchange rates and trends in the global economy.”
Although the fact we are in a global recession is obviously a factor in Sony’s results, the company itself has been going through a rather long rough patch, and it seems that Sony are going to be on an extremely long road to recovery, and it could be a lot longer than anticipated before the company manages to turn a profit again overall.
