Gaming division levels up Sony’s profits

Sony’s quarterly profit surged by almost 70 per cent thanks to strong sales of its image sensors, games, music and network services.
The Japanese electronics and entertainment company reported that profit in the three months to the end of September rose to 338.5 billion yen (£1.7 billion), up from 200 billion yen in the same period a year ago.
Sony revised its revenue forecast to 12.7 trillion yen, 1 per cent higher than projected in August, but kept its forecast for net profit unchanged at 980 billion yen.
Sales in Sony’s game and network services division increased by 12.3 per cent to 1,071.5 billion yen and it increased its full-year forecast for games revenues by 170 billion yen to 4,490 billion yen.
Sony attributed the growth primarily to rising sales of third-party games including add-on content, and network services such as its online membership service PlayStation Plus.
In August, the Chinese developer Game Science released Black Myth: Wukong, a video game inspired by the classical Chinese novel Journey to the West, on PlayStation and Xbox consoles. The game quickly became one of the fastest-selling in history, selling ten million units a few days after it was released.
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Sony also maintained its sales target for the PlayStation 5 at 18 million units for the financial year to the end of March, although just 6.2 million consoles have been shipped in the six months to September, down from 8.2 million in the same period last year.
Sony’s rival Nintendo cut its full-year operating profit forecast on Tuesday following poor sales of its Switch device during its eighth year on the market.
Sales in most of Sony’s divisions rose but revenue in its movie-making business, Sony Pictures, fell as it continued to feel the impact of the 2023 Hollywood strikes. The poor figures were partly offset by higher venues at Crunchyroll, the online streaming service for Japanese anime, and the Alamo Drafthouse cinema chain.
Sony said that its highest-selling music releases during the quarter included SZA’s SOS and David Gilmour’s Luck and Strange as the division reported an increase in sales of 9.7 per cent to 448.2 billion yen.
In the company’s imaging and sensing solutions, sales were up by 31.8 per cent to 535.6 billion yen thanks in part to strong demand for smartphones using Sony’s cameras.