Sony have just released their 2008 end of fiscal year report. Within, information on things like money intake, operating incomes, blah blah...oh, and some promising PlayStation division hardware sales for the past 12 months.
So how'd the company do?
For the 12 months until March 31, 2009, Sony's games group reported an overall decline in hardware sales. While at first glance this seems bad news, in fact, it's quite the opposite, as the numbers are skewed by the rapidly declining sales of the PlayStation 2, which dropped a whopping 42%, from selling over 13 million consoles in the 2007 financial year to "just" 7.91 million last year, a decline of nearly 6 million.
For Sony's more recent hardware - the PSP and PS3 - though, things are looking up! PSP sales were up 300,000 from the year before, to 14.1 million units worldwide, while PS3 sales saw an increase of 940,000 units (to 10.06 million) over FY2007.
Looking towards the future, the company also released a forecast for the number of units of each console they expect to ship in FY2009 (which runs until March 31, 2010). And those crystal ball numbers are, well, quite conservative:
PS2 - 5 million
PSP - 15 million
PS3 - 13 million