Sony's results are pony

Slump for PCs, chips, CD-R/RWs, CRTs

Sony's games division has made its first profit since the PlayStation 2 arrived last year. But overall the company made a surprise Q2 loss due to price slides for components and products.

For the three months to 30 September the company reported a group loss of 13.2 billion yen ($110 million), compared with a profit of 18.7 billion yen ($150 million) a year earlier. According to Bloomberg, analysts had expected Sony to sneak a profit of 650 million yen ($5.27 million).

Q2 sales rose 6 per cent to 1.79 trillion yen ($14.52 billion). Sony still expects to hit its full-year forecast of profits of 10 billion yen ($81.2 million) on sales of 7.5 trillion yen ($60.88 billion).

Sony's electronics business dropped seven per cent on last year for the period. PCs and display sales dropped but phones and PDA business saw the info and communications division scrape a revenue rise of 1.6 per cent to 301.3 billion yen ($2,532 million). Chip sales were down 25 per cent to 45.1 billion yen ($379 million), and component sales dropped eight per cent to 137.3 billion yen ($1,154 million) because of CD-R/RW and CRT doing badly.

Games business for Q2 was up by 83 per cent on the period a year earlier. The Playstation operation had an operating profit of 4.1 billion yen ($34 million) compared with a loss of 2.9 billion yen ($23.55 million) in the year-ago period. ®