Sony Chairman Sizes Up the Competition

[Overlord]

Gamers:
Nobuyuki Idei, Chairman of the Sony Corporation, spoke out today on his company's near future and their stance on broadband networks, which naturally led to a bit of discussion on the PlayStation. The full interview, including talk of Sony's mobile-phone division and the broadband competition, is at ADR, but here's the gist of the videogame bits.

Answering concerns that Sony was increasingly becoming a videogame company rather than a general consumer electronic company, Idei said that revenues from the game division still made up only about 10 percent of Sony's total business. He explained that it didn't register as profitable as some were making it out to be due to the heavy investments required every few years during the transition between generations of consoles.

However, one thing he stressed as helpful in those costs was the budget for Sony to build their own chip manufacturing plants, as opposed to competitors like Microsoft who must purchase chips from partners like Intel. Idei said that Sony was willing to make this investment because games are a core business for Sony, and questioned Microsoft's commitment to the gaming industry.

-Full Interview.

Your Thoughts?

[Rubeus]

A while ago Sony mentioned about supplying the Emotion Engine CPU to computer manufacturers to build computers, it didn't happen after all. Could it be that Sony is using the EE on other elecronic systems like videocamera, digital camera and so on?

But are you sure the profit of game business only make up of 10% of the profit? I remember back in the PSX time, game business made up of 40% of the total revenue in Sony, and now it's only 10%??

[Overlord]

Rebeus:
But are you sure the profit of game business only make up of 10% of the profit? I remember back in the PSX time, game business made up of 40% of the total revenue in Sony, and now it's only 10%??

That only happened once, and I think it was either 98 or 99. And It was the "harvest" season for the PSx. And they probably didn't have much to do in the electronic field that year. I doubt they will go that high again.

[Kamui]

The videogame business still is VERY profitable for sony.
No one can deny the strenght of SCE inside the company, just remember that Ken Kutaragi was the first name that came into the shareholders after the changes of the Sony CEO.

The profit from SCE is still low because Playstation 2 is still "young", the user base is still not large enough to capture a bigger profit. Besides, they have to be extra careful to keep up with competitions from Nintendo and Microsoft.

Maybe SCE should consider entering the handheld market, they should be able to capture a good share of the market with a 3D handheld machine, as Gameboy Advance does not have real built-in 3D support.

They have. thats what the PSOne is. only it uses a good ammount of power(Much like game gear) if somy count find a way for the PSOne to use less power and start haveing companys make more games for it again then maybe it could beat GBA.

[Cobi*]

Originally posted by Iori
The profit from SCE is still low because Playstation 2 is still "young", the user base is still not large enough to capture a bigger profit. Besides, they have to be extra careful to keep up with competitions from Nintendo and Microsoft.

Maybe SCE should consider entering the handheld market, they should be able to capture a good share of the market with a 3D handheld machine, as Gameboy Advance does not have real built-in 3D support.

sony shouldn't enter the handheld market. especially if they are serious about online gaming. they should focus on getting ps2bb off the ground for the time being.