Sony: PlayStation 5 launch not coming in a year

It will be more than a year before Sony introduces the PlayStation 5. The company will announce this during the presentation of the annual and quarterly figures. In 2018, shipments of PS4s fell. Deliveries of Xperia smartphones fell sharply.

Sony reported that it will take at least twelve months before the PlayStation 5 appears according to a journalist from WSJ in response to questions about the publication of the annual and quarterly figures. Sony introduced the PlayStation 4 in November 2013. There is a chance that the company will also release the successor before the lucrative month of December.

Sony announced the first details of the upcoming console in mid-April. This is about an AMD Ryzen octacore, AMD Navi GPU and fast SSD. Even then, Sony made it clear that the release is not expected this year, although the devkits are already with game developers.

PlayStation 4 shipments fell from 19 million units in 2017 to 17.8 million units in 2018, and Sony expects a further drop to 16 million PS4s for this year. In addition, Sony expects an increase in costs associated with developing the PS5. Sales of PS4 games in 2018 increased to 257.6 million units. In 2017, that number was 246.9 million games. Sony expects software sales to increase further this year.

Deliveries of Xperia smartphones halved in 2018. In 2017, Sony delivered 13.5 million smartphones, but in 2018 there were only 6.5 million. In 2019, Sony expects to be able to deliver 5 million more. In Sony’s fourth quarter of 2017, the company shipped 2.7 million smartphones; at the end of 2018, that number was 1.1 million Xperias. Sony wants to limit losses by cutting costs. Among other things, the company wants to withdraw from markets such as the Middle East and South America, Bloomberg writes.

TV deliveries also fell at the Japanese company, from 12.4 million in 2017 to 11.3 million last year. According to Sony, this is the result of a strategic decision to focus less on the quantity of TVs and more on the sale of high-end TVs. However, sales also fell by 6 percent. Sony expects to ship 11 million TVs this financial year, which ends March 31, 2020.

Sony also applies the strategy to focus on the high-end with cameras. The company delivered a total of 3.6 million cameras in 2018, a decrease of 800,000 units compared to 2017, but sales increased by 2 percent.

Sony’s annual turnover increased by one percent to the equivalent of 70 billion euros. Operating profit amounted to 7.2 billion euros. The fact that the bottom line is positive is partly due to the good deliveries of camera sensors for smartphones. Sony speaks of significant growth in this segment.