Sony's net profit doubles to $10.8B with games, music demand boom
A man stands near promotional pictures of the Play Station 5 at an electronics retail chain store in Tokyo, Japan, April 28, 2021. (AP Photo)


With people spending more time indoors amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the game and music sectors saw a large demand boom, enabling Sony to more than double its net profit in the last financial year to 1.17 trillion yen ($10.8 billion), the company said Wednesday.

The maker of PlayStation consoles and Xperia smartphones also posted an operating profit of $971.9 billion in the year ending March 31, up 15% from the previous financial year, while sales grew 9% to nearly 9 trillion yen.

Sales in the game and network services unit rose 34.3% to 2.6 trillion yen in the year, while the music sector saw its sales climb 10.6% to 939.9 billion yen, Sony said.

For the January-to-March quarter, the company saw a seven-fold increase in net profit to 107 billion yen, while posting an operating profit of 66.5 billion yen, up 87.5% from the same period last year.

Sales jumped 27% year on year to 2.2 trillion yen in the three-month period, Sony said.

Sony projects a net profit of 660 billion yen in the current financial year which runs until the end of March 2022 and an operating profit of 930 billion yen, while sales are estimated at 9.7 trillion yen, the company said.