Sony Reported a Loss of $1.2 Billion Dollars while PS4 Counts 12.3 Million Units sold.

Sony has released its financials for the three months covering July to September, and while Sony posted a loss of $1.2 billion dollars for the quarter, as far as the company's projections are concerned, that's actually good news. The loss represents less-than-expected numbers for the consumer electronics giant and the PS4 was a strong performer for Sony, beating expectations.

Sony revealed it shipped 3.3 million PlayStation 4 consoles during the period. This combined with over 800,000 PS3 consoles being sold in the same period helped the company's game division revenues to rise 84 percent year-on-year. Unfortunately, it's not all good news for Sony's gaming offerings. The handheld division -- comprising combined sales of Vitas, PSPs and PlayStation TVs -- just hit the 700,000 mark, which is 100,000 down on the same period last year.

With the additional 3.3 million PS4s sold in the second quarter, this brings PS4 total lifetime sales to 12.3 million units. That number is just over twice that of Microsoft's Xbox One which has sold 6.1 million units. In fact, the PS4 has already broken even, despite being just shy of a year since its release, something that it took the PS3 4 years to achieve.

The biggest earner for Sony was its image sensor used in iPhones and many other Chinese-made phones. However, Sony's own smartphone division saw a cut in its sales forecast to 41 million units from a previous forecast of 43 million.

Despite the games division's ¥309.5 billion ($2.77 billion) revenue, an 83 percent rise on last year's ¥4.2 billion operating loss, and the fact this was converted into a ¥21.8 billion operating profit ($195.5 million), the company as a whole fared less well.

Sony made a loss of ¥136 billion ($1.22 billion) for the quarter and predicts net losses of ¥230 billion for the end of the financial year, even though the game division looks set to rake in an additional ¥50 billion in revenue compared to earlier estimates.

News of the less-than-expected losses buoyed Sony's stock price 0.8% higher than it was previous to the earnings report.

Source: ign.com

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