Sony Q3: PS3 price cut biting deep, software up 13%

Sony has posted a loss of $1.2 billion for the quarter ending December 31, 2011, citing floods in Thailand as a major contributing factor for the disappointing result.

Sony brought in $23,370 million in revenue, a 17.4% year-on-year decrease.

The Consumer Products & Services division, of which Sony Computer Entertainment is a part, brought in $12.8 billion in revenue, a 24.4% year-on-year decrease resulting in losses of loss of $1.1 billion.

Sony's game business was highlighted alongside LCD TVs as under-performing during the quarter, with PlayStation3's price reduction and increased marketing costs tipped as villains.

The company pointed to recent disastrous flooding in Thailand, beginning in October 2011 and severely hindering Sony's manufacturing and supply chain, for a company-wide drop in revenue, but also noted the weakening yen as having a significant impact on profits.

On hardware, PS3 sold 6.5 million units, up 200,000 from the same period in 2011. PSP was down, however, with sales of 2.4 million, a loss of 800,000 units. PS2 continued its decline with 900,000 units sold in Q3, down 1.2 million on the 2.1 million units sold in the same period.

For software, PS3 was at 66.2 million units, up on last year's 57.6 million, a rise of 13%. PSP software went down by 5.1 million units from last year's 16.5 million to 11.4 million this year. PS2 software was also downward, with sales of 2.5 million compared to 5.3 million in the same timeline in 2011.

PlayStation Vita hardware and software numbers weren't mentioned.

Full-year outlook, for the 12 months ending March 31, was lowered to ¥6.4 trillion from ¥6.5 trillion.

In preparation for its financial release today, Sony announced last night that former SCE boss and current head of the Consumer Products & Service division Kazuo Hirai would be taking over as president and CEO following the retirement of current incumbent Sir Howard Stringer in April.