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.

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