Sony Corporation has published its financial results for Quarter 3 (October to December) of 2020. These results provide some interesting information about PlayStation 5, hardware and software sales and other things related to PlayStation.
A document recently released on Sony’s Investor relations site – a transcript of the earnings webcast – tells us some key details about the PS5 and how PlayStation performed in 2020.
Here are some interesting takeaways from the consolidated earnings chat transcript.
PS5 Points of Interest from Sony Q3 2020 Earnings
- Sony Interactive Entertainment – Sony’s Game & Network Services made 883 billion yen in quarter 3 of 2020. That’s $8.4 billion or £6.1 billion. Operating Income (profit) amounted to 80.2 billion yen or £559 million.
- The PS5 was sold at a loss and Sony still made these massive sales and profits.
- Since launching in November 2020. The PS5 had sold 4.5 million units by the end of December.
- Sony wants to sell over 7.6 million PS5’s by the end of this financial year (end of March) and they are on target to achieve this. However, they admit that they have not been able to meet the high level of demand for the PlayStation 5.
- PlayStation user engagement has increased a lot due to lockdowns caused by Covid-19. Total gameplay time in December 2020 was 30% higher than in the same period for 2019.
- 87% of PS5 users are subscribed to PlayStation Plus. That is very high according to Sony. PS Plus now has a total of 47.4 million subscribers as of the end of December 2020.
- PS5 had more games at launch than any previous PlayStation console launch, and the games sold well. Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales had sold 4.1 million copies by the end of December.
So, a strong start to the new generation for Sony and PlayStation. Sony expects the total sales for Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), Sony’s Game & Network Services arm, to increase by 30 billion yen to 2 trillion 630 billion yen by the end of this financial year. That’s a cool 18.3 billion pounds. This will be Sony’s highest profits ever.
