Sony Runs at Net Loss of 2.2 Billion Dollars This Year

I have to admit, this surprised me for a few seconds.  I mean, Sony is currently reigning champ of the gaming world: the PlayStation 4 is the best-selling current-gen console on the market, having sold millions more copies than both the Xbox One and the Wii U… how could Sony’s year-end financial report say they LOST 2.2 billion dollars?

I mean, it’s not as if the PS4 was being produced at a loss, or that first-party Sony games haven’t been popular, so how could Sony have lost money?

Of course, after actually reading the report, I felt like a right fool: how negligent of me to forget Sony does more than produce video games?   For indeed, while Sony’s gaming branch might be on top of the world, their smartphone branch… not so much.  See, earlier this year Sony took its attention away from developing PC’s and laptops and focused more attention on smartphones and tablets—in itself, that’s not a bad decision.  Sony is a Japanese company and smartphones are much more popular over there than computers, and Sony brand computers have never been as popular as Dell or HP anyway.  But the problem was that Sony smartphones could only run on T-Mobile, which, in case you didn’t know, isn’t a popular carrier at all.

So they put all their eggs in the smartphone basket, then proceeded to let the basket get run over by a truck.  Their newly-hired Chief Financial Officer Kenichiro Yoshida says they can write off the losses for this year, but the news has reinforced some people’s beliefs that Sony has no place in the Smartphone business, either.  It certainly faces some stiff competition between Samsung and Apple…

I doubt Sony will give up that easy, but they might reconsider their options when it comes to carriers.  Time will tell.  In the meantime, it seems unlikely they’ll sell off their gaming branch, unlike Microsoft—which has been toying with the idea for the past year or so.