Sony Sales Fall, But PS3 Hardware And Software Rise

It's good to see the PlayStation brand flourishing in these relatively rough financial times.
I am a little surprised at the loss overall, however. Maybe it is just because a billion dollars sounds a lot to me. Perhaps scaled to a Sony sized company it isn't a huge loss. I don't know.

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Along the floods and deteriorating market conditions Sony also mentioned the PS3 price cut as a reason for the loss.

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The biggest issue for the Consumer Products & Services division's problems is the LCD TV market which has gone commodity. Sony's TV product line is unable to compete against commodity priced TVs. They still work in the low volume, high end markets with their premium prices, but compared to the mass market, that is a tiny proportion of sales. Much like what happened with Trinitron TVs decades ago, Sony will have to look to something else because they simply cannot compete with the far cheaper commodity priced TVs from China and Korea.

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Very true. There's way too much fierce competition in the HD TV market. Sony needs to opt out and the sooner the better.

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Yeah for sure.

They've slowly been focusing more and more on LED and 3D, but they need to abandon LCD and treat it like it's obsolete. Either that, or they need to innovate new features into their tv's. They already have features within their HDTV's that offer better quality than the competition, but it's not a big enough difference for most people to care.

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I've had a fallen out with Sony HDTVs. My father had a 5k TV go bad after only 3 years and one of my Sony TVs had its entire HDMI board go bad causing me to only use component cables on it.

The defective part for my dad's TV costs $1700 and for me it's $400. Meanwhile my mother's Samsung and my friends Samsung are doing just fine.

Look it up if you want, there have been large complaints towards Sony and their HDTVs for having defective products in them.

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Last edited by LimitedVertigo on 2/2/2012 12:08:02 PM

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Probably disgruntled Foxxcomm employees. lol

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Highlander, Sony also markets to mainstream budget minded consumers in competition with say Vizio. If you hadn't noticed Walmart sells 400~500 dollar sony HDTV's ;)
They tend to produce the premium model of its respective class. It's basically always been that way.

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I know that Temjin, but if you've read through the financial reports from Sony over the last few quarters you'll know that the TV business has been a huge liability for Sony recently. It all comes down to TVs costing too much to produce, selling for far too little, strong competition from those with cheaper production and the destruction of the wafer thin margin on TV sales caused by the changes in exchange rates. Commodity price TVs are still 20-30% cheaper than the equivalent Sony models. So how many consumers in the mass market are going to choose Sony with that kind of price differential? Sony has no place competing in the mass market where the profit margins are already a extremely marginal.

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Supposedly, Sony's newest tech "Crystal OLED" HDTV's that will be coming out later on(not sure when) top any OLED's out there now,by a factor of 3 times better(including their own).

BTW, I had posted the whole article on Sony's upcoming Crystal OLED HDTV over in a earlier thread about a month ago

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LV: Yeah, but Sony isn't the only company to get such complaints. I had two Samsung TVs die on me in a span of only four years, and the only reason I stuck with them for my third (the one I currently have), is because I switched to LED. I think there was always something unreliable about LCD, regardless of manufacturer.

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Cool beings, no, I don't follow that stuff. My time is spent reading about stuff like Soul Caliber land art and out of bounds exception errors =p

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Fortunately my LG LCD has worked flawlessly all these years - now going onto its 4th year without issue. Here's another 10 years I hope...

Q!

"play.experience.enjoy"

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Sony really needs to move their production elsewhere. Preferably somewhere far far away from water.

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Didn't they just start outsourcing production of their TV's to Foxconn last year?
There aren't too many places TV's get built, with Taiwan taking up a massive chunk of it.

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Well to be more specific I was referring to the production of products that are actually worth the effort. HD TV's are probably a lost cause for Sony.

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A very small % of Sony's TV output comes actually from Japan, they are the only ones worth having - IMHO. They will be the ones that use the OLED and Crystal LED technology.

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2.9 billion dollar operating loss for the quarter. Sony said: "categories contributing to the detoriation in operating results include LCD televisions...reflecting a decline in unit selling prices that exceeded cost and expense reductions and the game business...reflecting higher marketing costs."


Off topic: I just read that the Resident Evil 6 demo will be 2 months timed exclusive for the 360. Capcom called it a "business decision".

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Last edited by Excelsior1 on 2/2/2012 5:12:59 PM

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LCD TV's are cool.

And MS is not cool for spending money on exclusivity deals over producing more games for the gamers who got them where they're at today.

Um, so yeah, Sony needs to quit with the LCD crap and make with the 3D star wars hologram stuff.... Like star wars..., but with more color

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not exactly surprising.
playstaions doing allot better then it was, but every other division is slumping like it should be.
bravias, SE, and xploid use to be the top of their class now there bottom bargain bin quality but still ridiculously overpriced!
i was in the city this arvo for a interview for quantum next year, and while i was there i stopped into JBs store my god i cant believe how big that place is!
10K acer predators, and 3 screen surround sound vision just made me want to whip out my check book.
the sammys they got there, oh my freaking lord make the bravias look like stone age tech!
actually quite pathetic, i remember when i was researching for the TV downstairs and was looking at the bravia Z55 series a few salespeople told me not to get it because it actually had a worse picture quality then the 45 it replaced.
lower quality parts to try save little cash, even though the RRP went up by 600 bucks!
even the old XBRs, a family friend of mine has a 4 year old XBR and it looks 10 times better then the current LX900 series which has a brand new RRP of double what the XBR did new!
double the price, and no where near as good how does that work?

thats why $ony is up the crapper lately, not only are they treating their fans like bank accounts, the quality has gone down the drain too.
so you would think RRPs would go down too, but if anything they have gone up!
SE is just as bad too, ive had my xperia arc for 3 days now and already the screen is broken and the battery is dead!
after 3 freaking days!
samsung is kicking the sh*t out of everyone at the moment, simply because there products are either as good as everyone elses, if not better, and are cheaper.
put a sammy next to a panasonic and you cant tell the difference.
even though the panasonic will be on average 500 bucks more!
so what is your 500 bucks getting you?
$ony really need to stop treating their customers like disposable cash machines!
either charge a premium for premium quality, like you use to.
or charge cheap for cheap quality.
not charging for a Ferrari and giving your customers a Suzuki!

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