Sony Group Corp yesterday reported its best-ever sales in the financial year to March thanks to strong results in movies, electronics and music, although net profit dipped 14 percent from the previous year’s record.
A gaming boom amid COVID-19 lockdowns has slowed, but the Japanese giant has seen success in other entertainment sectors, with Spider-Man: No Way Home overtaking Avatar as North America’s third-highest-grossing film.
Demand for sensors used in smartphone cameras has continued to soar, and Sony Music also scored a winner with Adele’s latest album 30 and strong licence revenue in its popular anime business.
Photo: Kimimasa Mayama, EPA-EFE
It reported full-year sales for 2021-2022 of ¥9.9 trillion (US$76 billion) and net profit of ¥882 billion.
In 2020-2021, Sony logged a record net profit of more than ¥1 trillion, partly thanks to tax gains and the explosion in popularity of video games during lockdowns.
The 10 percent increase in sales from ¥8.99 trillion in 2020-2021 “was mainly due to significant increases in sales in the pictures, electronics products and solutions and music segments,” Sony said.
Hideki Yasuda, senior analyst at Toyo Securities Co, said that Sony would likely benefit from the fall of the yen, which has hit 20-year lows against the US dollar this year.
The conglomerate is now succeeding in a broader range of sectors with favorable business environments, such as music and movies, Yasuda said.
“Sony is really turning into a content company now, from its previous status as an electronics manufacturer,” he said.
For the current financial year to March next year, Sony predicted that sales would rise 15 percent to ¥11.4 trillion, while net profit is projected to slip 6 percent to ¥830 billion.
Sony has faced challenges rolling out its PlayStation 5 (PS5) console, which remains difficult to get hold of 18 months after its launch in November last year — in part due to supply chain disruption, including a global chip shortage.
The company “could have sold so many more PS5s if they were able to produce more,” said Serkan Toto, an analyst at Kantan Games Inc in Tokyo.
“I don’t see any kind of problem for Sony in the gaming world or in the gaming market, except for the supply chain issues,” Toto said. “It’s impossible to get a PlayStation 5. It’s ridiculous.”
Separately, Nintendo Co issued a cautious forecast for the current financial year as it reported a solid 2021-2022 net profit of ¥477.7 billion, down 0.6 percent year-on-year.
The gaming giant, which has benefited from a string of popular titles including the January release of Pokemon Legends: Arceus, expects net profit for 2022-2023 of ¥340 billion.
This time was supposed to be different. The memorychip sector, famous for its boom-and-bust cycles, had changed its ways. A combination of more disciplined management and new markets for its products — including 5G technology and cloud services — would ensure that companies delivered more predictable earnings. Yet, less than a year after memory companies made such pronouncements, the US$160 billion industry is suffering one of its worst routs ever. There is a glut of the chips sitting in warehouses, customers are cutting orders and product prices have plunged. “The chip industry thought that suppliers were going to have better control,” said
Enimmune Corp (安特羅生技) has obtained marketing approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its EnVAX-A71 vaccine for enterovirus 71 (EV-71), becoming the nation’s first enterovirus vaccine completely made in Taiwan, it said yesterday. After spending 13 years and NT$1.5 billion (US$49.77 million) on the research and development of the vaccine, Enimmune plans to start manufacturing and marketing it by the end of March, the company said in a statement, without disclosing customer order figures. “It is possible that the vaccine would not be included in a national vaccination program initially, and consumers would need to pay for it themselves,” parent
Vaccine skeptics blocking transfusions for life-saving surgeries, Facebook groups inciting violence against doctors and a global search for unvaccinated donors — COVID-19 misinformation has bred a so-called “pure blood” movement. The movement spins anti-vaccine narratives focused on unfounded claims that receiving blood from people inoculated against COVID-19 “contaminates” the body. Some have advocated for blood banks that draw from “pure” unvaccinated people, while medics in North America say they have fielded requests from people demanding transfusions from donors who have not received a vaccine. In closed social media groups, vaccine skeptics — who brand themselves as “pure bloods” — promote violence against doctors
Asteroid mining start-up AstroForge Inc is planning to launch its first two missions to space this year as it seeks to extract and refine metals from deep space. The first launch, scheduled for April, is to test AstroForge’s technique for refining platinum from a sample of asteroid-like material. The second, planned for October, would scout for an asteroid near Earth to mine. The missions are part of AstroForge’s goal of refining platinum-group metals from asteroids, with the aim of bringing down the cost of mining these metals. It also hopes to reduce the massive amount of carbon emissions that stem from mining