Sony reporting healthy profits on strong sales of sensors and games
Sony's profit rose 69% in July-September from a year earlier on the back of strong sales of its image sensors, games, music and network services,
TOKYO — Sony’s profit rose 69% in July-September from a year earlier on the back of strong sales of its image sensors, games, music and network services, the Japanese electronics and entertainment company said on Friday.
Quarterly profit was 338.5 billion yen ($2.2 billion), up from 200 billion yen in the year-earlier period, while consolidated quarterly sales edged up 3% year-on-year to 2.9 trillion yen ($19 billion).
Tokyo-based Sony’s latest quarterly results were boosted by healthy demand around the world for image sensors used in mobile products.
Sales also held up in its video games division. During the latest quarter, 3.8 million PlayStation 5 game consoles were sold globally, compared with 4.9 million units sold the same period a year ago.
Demand remained strong for PS5 game software, according to Sony.
The top-selling music releases from Sony for the quarter included “SOS” by SZA, David Gilmore’s “Luck and Strange” and Kenshi Yonezu’s “Lost Corner.”
One area where Sony’s business suffered was its pictures division, including TV shows and movies, which was impacted by production delays caused by the strikes in Hollywood.
Among the recent hit films from Sony was “It Ends With Us,” a romantic drama based on a novel.
Sony, which also makes digital cameras and TVs, maintained its 980-billion yen ($6.4 billion) profit forecast for the fiscal year through March 2025, up 1% from the previous fiscal year.
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What happened when Sony Pictures pitted creator content against traditional creative
Winning The Drum Awards for Social in the Entertainment category is MG OMD and Sony Pictures with a campaign for the blockbuster film Napoleon.
Sony Pictures were the first studio in the UK to use a creator/traditional creative multi-cell BLS on.
#sonypictures #movies #hollywood #entertainment
The campaign ended up being a huge success, with a 8.8% in lift in awareness and a 6% lift in intent across TikTok. Meta drove a 34 point lift in ad recall (236% higher than the Entertainment benchmark), 15.6 awareness and a 9.2 point lift in intent.
The LiveRamp study concluded a 15% incremental lift in box office sales via ticket bookings, largely driven by a 9.3% increase in average spend per customer – showcasing TikTok users were more likely to buy premium seats or go at peak times.
Overall, this campaign was a media first and was able to provide additional value and insight to Sony Pictures for all their future campaigns.
‘The team at MGOMD are always looking to evolve our approach to social media investment ensuring we are driving the most value from the creative and different opportunities with each partner. The campaign for Napoleon allowed us to exploit beta testing new products while combining new measurement opportunities with key media partners, which not only provided excellent campaign results, but also learnings that we are able to take forward into our other campaigns. MGOMD have given us a benchmark for success to measure our campaigns against moving forward," Joshua Heaton-Armstrong, head of digital at Sony Pictures Releasing UK
This social campaign for Sony's Napoleon movie outperformed all expectations
Napoleon was the Tentpole release at the end of 2023, directed by Ridley Scott, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby. Our approach to the social campaign was to drive high impact at scale. We focused on Meta and TikTok for this campaign, utilising Meta’s Target Frequency Beta, and a Multi-cell BLS on TikTok to measure the effectiveness of creator content vs more traditional creative. This was a studio first in the UK, becoming the first to include a Creative Breakout for Sales Lift, as well as including a Movio Study alongside this, allowing us to attribute ticket sales back to different types of creatives, from awareness through to intent.
Sony closes Concord studio and permanently shuts down the game
Sony is closing Firewalk Studios, the studio behind its PlayStation Concord game that it took offline last month after a disastrous launch. In a message to PlayStation staff, Hermen Hulst, CEO of the PlayStation studio business group, says Firewalk Studios will close alongside Neon Koi, a mobile game studio.
#sony #entertainment #gaming #firewalkstudios
“We have spent considerable time these past few months exploring all our options,” says Hulst. “After much thought, we have determined the best path forward is to permanently sunset the game and close the studio. I want to thank all of Firewalk for their craftsmanship, creative spirit and dedication.”
Hulst says Concord didn’t hit Sony’s targets and that the PlayStation maker will “take the lessons learned from Concord and continue to advance our live service capabilities to deliver future growth in this area.”
Concord debuted on August 23rd on both PS5 and PC, but Sony took the game offline on September 6th after poor sales of the game. Estimates have put sales at under 25,000, and Concord only managed to hit an all-time peak of just 697 players on Steam, lower than the launch peak of The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.
Sony’s Neon Koi mobile game development studio is also shutting down, despite Hulst saying “mobile remains a priority growth area.” Sony originally acquired the German-Finnish studio when it was known as Savage Game Studios in 2022, and the team was working on an unannounced triple-A mobile live service action game.
“With this re-focused approach, Neon Koi will close, and its mobile action game will not be moving forward,” says Hulst. “Both decisions were given serious thought, and ultimately, we feel they are the right ones to strengthen the organization.”
Some of the impacted developers may find roles within Sony’s other studios, but the rest will join the thousands in the game industry that have been laid off over the past couple of years.