Sony has reported that the PlayStation 3 is seeing gradually declining production costs and growing popularity of the console has led to a strong improvement on the company’s balance sheet. Sony also noted that the company shipped about 37 million game consoles and more than 267 million games during the year.
Sony’s “PlayStation” unit posted a $1.2 billion USD loss for the year, an improvement from the $2.3 billion USD loss the division posted last fiscal year. According to Sony, the decrease was primarily thanks to PS3 hardware reductions and the increasing sales of PS3 software and accessories.
For the fiscal year, there were 7.24 million PS3 units sold, up from 5.63 million in fiscal 2006. The PSP was even more popular, selling 13.89 million devices for a total of 41 million PSPs to date.
PSP software sales declined but PS3 software sales made up the difference. Total game units were 267.4 million, compared to 261.5 million in fiscal 2006.
Result for: increasing sales
According to data compiled by research firm DisplaySearch,, global LCD TV sales outsold plasma TV sales by a huge 8-to-1 margin for the Q1 2008 and that gap doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller anytime soon.
Over 21 million LCD TVs were sold during the timeframe compared to a measly 2.8 million plasma sets, says the report.
The total number of TVs sold during the period was 46.1 million, about equal to year-over-year sales for 2007. Overall revenue jumped 8 percent however, to $24.8 billion USD thanks to increasing sales of larger, more expensive LCD and plasma displays.
Aging CRT TVs were still the best selling, with 22.1 million sold, with LCD closely behind at 21.1. Plasma and rear projection televisions brought up the rear with 2.8 million and 134,000 sold respectively. Year over year CRT sales were down 21%, LCD up 45%, plasma up 20% and RPTV down 79%.
In terms of brands, Samsung led in revenue for the 9th straight quarter, with huge 39 percent year over year growth.
