Sony Group Corp. released a cautionary report for the current fiscal year, warning of the impact of the global economic downturn on consumer electronics and the entertainment business. The company’s revenues would reach ¥1.17 trillion yen at the end of March 2024, about $8.6 billion dollars. Below the estimate of ¥1.27 trillion yen. This prior falls on the PlayStation division, as the company expects fewer sales of PlayStation Studios games during the current fiscal year.
Sony shipped 6.3 million units of the PlayStation 5 or PS5 console in the first three months of 2022, for a total of 38.4 million consoles sold. The electronic giant shipped 19.1 million PS5s during fiscal year 2022, exceeding the estimate of 18 million. In turn, tripling the reduced production of ‘hardware’ in previous years.
By fiscal year 2023, Sony expects sell 25 million consoles, according to COO Hiroki Totoki. However, at Sony they expect demand to remain weak in the face of a broad global economic downturn. The volatile European market and trade conflicts with China are some of the factors.
“We are not optimistic and we remain vigilant, especially in the US market, which has the biggest impact on our business,” says Totoki.
“Hardware sales have increased in tandem with Sony’s plan. But momentum in software, the lucrative part of the video game business, remains weak. This shows that PlayStation users are not buying new games.”says Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Toyo Securities.
PlayStation Network monthly active users fell to 108 million from 112 million in the holiday season quarter. It will take time for increased hardware sales to manifest in new subscribers to the service. PS Plus.
There were no major game releases from Sony in the quarter that ended. That limited the growth of the PlayStation division, which also didn’t get much of a boost with the release of PlayStation VR2. Totoki did not refer to it or to the expansion in mobile markets.
“On the software side, Sony has quite a bit of work to do. Everyone expects PlayStation mobile and games as a service, where are they?«, questions the analyst Serkan Toto for his part. As long as PS5 games continue to share their releases with the PS4 generation, there is little incentive to invest in more expensive and practically identical versions.
