SONY POSTS LOSS
July 26, 2000

Sony today posted losses for its first fiscal quarter of 88.29 billion yen ($841 million) on revenues of 1.56 trillion yen ($14.87 billion). Overall sales were up from the same period last year, but earnings were down more than 100 billion yen.

For its games business, the company posted losses of 16 billion yen ($153 million), compared with profits of 17.3 billion yen during the same period last year, on revenues of 107.7 billion yen ($1.02 billion), down 6.3% from last year.

Worldwide Playstation shipments were 630,000, down 3.35 million from the same period last year, indicating that the system is nearing its end. Total PSX shipments at the end of the quarter stood at 73.55 million.

Playstation2 worldwide shipments during the quarter were 1.13 million. Despite this, only 1.7 million units of software (including first and third party titles) shipped. Cumulative shipments of PS2 hardware are 2.54 million, with software shipments at 4.6 million (or 1.8 per system sold over its first 4 months).

Ultimately, the losses the company posted resulted from a one-time write-off in its movie business, due to changes in US accounting rules, of 101.7 billion yen ($968 million), approximately the same as the difference between its Q12000 and Q12001 results.