Sonny intends to keep less than 20% of Sony Financial Group Inc. shares, following this company spin-off, focusing its business portfolio strategy on the entertainment and image sensor sectors.
Considering the capital needed by the business, Sony Chief Financial Officer Hiroki Totoki claimed that "it is a challenge to balance this with our investment in other growth areas such as entertainment and image sensors".
The multinational is creating synergies across its diverse business lines, as video games, music, and movies, to create a more integrated and powerful entertainment ecosystem.
An analyst at LightStream Research, Mio Kato, stated that the company spin-off “doesn’t change anything drastically in terms of the outlook for Sony, but it does make it a more pure-play entertainment company, which the market generally likes.”
In the fiscal year ending in March, the finance division saw a 5% decline in revenue, totaling 1.45 trillion yen ($10.74 billion). However, operating profit surged by 49%, reaching $223.9 billion yen, helped by a one-time gain from a real estate sale.
In this financial year, an accounting change makes Sony expect a 40% decrease in revenue and a 20% decrease in profit, driven by the lack of one-off gains recorded in the previous year.
Sony’s share price climbed 6% in Tokyo trading, following the company’s announcement of a share buyback of up to 2.03% of its stock.
The multinational expects to sell a record 25 million PlayStation 5 consoles this year, as supply problems start to improve. While the demand for the console is strong, the tech company thinks sales of its games will drop, since it doesn’t have many big titles coming out.
One game soon due for release that fans await is the sequel to Marvel’s Spider-Man.
Sony’s competitor Nintendo Co. reported that it sold over 10 million copies of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom within just the first three days of release. The game launched on the popular Switch console, which has an install base of more than 125 million units.
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