Sony has lowered its profit guidance on a slowdown in the Playstation business and weak results from financial deals.
The Japanese electronics giant now expects a profit of 800 billion yen (5.8 billion euros) for the fiscal year running until the end of March. That would be a decrease of 9.3 percent. In May, Sony still expected net profit of 830 billion yen.
At the start of the pandemic, the gaming business was growing rapidly as people spent more time at home. It is now clear that the level at that time cannot be maintained. Sales of Playstation software fell by a good quarter to 47.1 million games year-on-year. Sony cut the forecast for the operating profit of the games division in the current financial year from 305 to 255 million yen.
In the past quarter, Sony sold 2.4 million Playstation 5 devices. That was better than the previous quarter with two million consoles, but was well below the 3.9 million from the Christmas quarter. Launched in November 2020, the model is still hard to come by due to the chip shortage.
Group sales should increase by 15.9 percent to 11.5 trillion yen in the current fiscal year, Sony predicted. In the first business quarter, Sony posted a bottom line profit of 218.2 billion yen, an increase of three percent over the same period last year. Revenue rose 2.4 percent to 2.31 trillion yen.
