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Sony's Immediate Future
Posted on Thursday, December 6 2012 @ 13:13:45 Eastern

On Razörfist's "The Rageaholic" this post contains a link to a .pdf financial report from Sony embedded in the image at the top and a bit of commentary below that. Razörfist concludes from the selected information that there is no PS4 dev kit. This means there will not be a Playstation 4 in the near future. A little arithmetic follows.

Conversions will be done using information from the St. Louis Federal Reserve. From this we can do some conversion with the chart supplied in the PDF to get some more local numbers.

Sony R&D Expenditures from 2008-2012 - All conversions done with the April 1st conversion rate of each year.

2008 ¥520,568,000,000 or $5,069,533,111
2009 ¥497,297,000,000 or $5,027,264,456
2010 ¥432,001,000,000 or $4,622,670,078
2011 ¥426,814,000,000 or $5,131,388,326
2012 ¥433,477,000,000 or $5,334,943,952

It's possible Razörfist is mistaken. After all, he does characterize R&D expenditures as having not gone up at all in the past three years but from 2010-2011 they went up by more than 500 million dollars and from 2011-2012 it also went up another 200 million. It is also possible the visibility of expenditure on the PS4 is being swallowed up by other projects being cancelled or abandoned and other avenues of research just generally being closed off. However, this argument overlooks two problems - the dollar values do not count the lowering purchase power of the dollar itself and it is extremely unlikely that an undertaking of this scale could be buried in noise via what would otherwise be a massive dip in R&D. I think his conclusion is sound. I think the PS4 is at best a long way off. Once again the Microsoft console will beat the Sony console to the market by a wide margin. It will be the console more powerful than the Wii U and the seventh generation hardware. It won't have to fight for exclusives with Sony because Sony won't have a system.

UPDATE: I was wrong. The PS4 has been announced.

Comments

sliverstorm
Joined: Jun 2007

Posted: Dec 12th, 2012 at 10:17 pm
To offer a counterpoint (in a few posts, because God Forbid I should be able to use a carriage return in a blog comment): Another pretty common way to look at R&D spend is as a % of total operating revenue [i.e. excluding financing and other revenue]. Over the past 10 years, that number has ranged from a low of 6.35% in fiscal 2008 to a high of 7.95% in fiscal 2006 (Sony's fiscal years end on March 31st, so fiscal 2006 includes holiday 2005, etc.). For fiscal 2012, that number was sitting at 7.84%

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sliverstorm
Joined: Jun 2007

Posted: Dec 12th, 2012 at 10:26 pm
Sony stopped breaking out Game R&D in Fiscal 2008, so we can't see the current % contribution of game R&D to total R&D. Historically between 2003 and 2008, the % of R&D dollars devoted to games has ranged from a low of 13.6% in 2005 to a high of 20.4% in 2006. This is pretty much in line with the Sales revenue split between Games and Total Operating Revenue [currently, Sony makes about 14% of its operating revenue from Games]. So basically, Sony's other operations are large enough that they could pretty easily mask the R&D expenses associated with console development. Combined with the relatively high R&D as a % of revenue in 2012, which mirrors 2006's behavior, I think it's not a bad assumption that the next generation from Sony is still on its way.

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sliverstorm
Joined: Jun 2007

Posted: Dec 12th, 2012 at 10:45 pm
Data is here: fileswap.com/dl/aLDyCu2X95 I like this article a lot--it's a great example of solid, DIY fact-checking. However, I'm not sure if I agree with converting from Yen to USD in this particular case, because the R&D expenses were likely incurred mostly in local currency, and therefore not subject to the US exchange rate. Of course, if you believe otherwise, then it's a very clever move for what you are looking at.

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oblivion437
Joined: Nov 2006

Posted: Dec 13th, 2012 at 7:57 am
The conversion is a serious possible problem. I used the conversion rates from April 1st of each year rather than March 1st because their fiscal year ends on the 31st of March. It's as close as I could get. Without the conversions (and I think you're right that they may be deceiving us) it still remains that they spent ~¥90,000,000,000 less in R&D in 2012 than 2008.

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sliverstorm
Joined: Jun 2007

Posted: Dec 13th, 2012 at 3:50 pm
That is true--in fact, that ¥90,000,000,000 decrease happened just between 2008 and 2010. However, paired with that was a decrease of ¥1,650,000,000,000 in revenue, primarily from the Consumer Electronics division (which includes TVs, Cameras, Video Recorders, etc.), which contracted almost 40% (¥ 2,000,000,000,000) over the two years due to the exchange rate (which you mentioned), a major crunch in the Camera and Video Recorder business, and Sony's exit from certain LCDs and all CRT TVs in 2009. I think lowered R&D spend is primarily coming from decreases in this area, and not necessarily games.

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