Just back in May we heard Sony’s financial results of the fiscal year ending on March 31st 2014. The company lost a shocking $1.29 billion (£760million) in sales due mostly to its poor PC sales. Even with the newly announced PlayStation 4 console and with April’s update of over 7million units sold worldwide, Sony was, and still is, continuing to lose money.
A shareholders meeting took place recently and currently shareholders are backing CEO Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai and other executives. With Hirai pledging this will be the year the company will fix its “money-losing structure” once and for all, and apologized for not having acted quickly enough. It seems shareholders are putting lots of faith into Sony’s CEO and executives to keep up the growth of PlayStation, development for the platform, and for Hirai to re-structure the business to a more profitable status.
It’s interesting to see from a consumer’s point of view, as from a PlayStation stand point; it appears that Sony is doing very well, and you would expect nothing more than a positive future for one of the most widespread brands worldwide. But we have to remember Sony is more than just PlayStation and these other once profitable business are not doing so well.
Back in February Sony even announced that they were going to sell their PC business, Sony Viao range, due to the lack of sales and profit and this was closed by the end of March.
March was an upsetting month for employees of Sony. The company decided to make many layoffs through Sony Worldwide Studios, the biggest collection of first party developers in the industry.
Sony planned to lay off a total 5,000 workers in total by end of March. This is a significant shake up to such a huge company such as of Sony. Even with the ever-selling PS4’s, with these losses and layoffs, it looked as if Sony were struggling.
The TV division has been making losses for 10 years straight and hopefully with the integration of unique services like PlayStation Now (the in-home game streaming service); we can see some interesting steps forwards.
Sony used to dominate the market with new technology. Years ago, we used to see only Sony brand devices such as the Walkman or Camcorders. But nowadays we see so many more company’s doing the same thing, for a cheaper price.
Sony did however state that the PS4 is one of their most profitable parts of their business and now E3 has been and gone, we can see the hype has quickly been raised back up and looks as if we will get many new games at the end of 2014 through to 2015.
