Sony Aims to Expand Presence in VR Market; Won’t Speculate on Microsoft’s Acquisition of Activision

Today, during Sony’s quarterly conference call for investors and analysts, chief financial officer Hiroki Totoki was asked to comment on Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, VR, and more.

Totoki-san mentioned that it’s difficult for Sony to say anything about the deal between Microsoft and Activision Blizzard. He added that the acquisition isn’t completed yet and Sony doesn’t have a clear picture of what kind of business model changes will happen. Due to that, they don’t want to speculate.

Rather, they prefer to pursue and execute their own strategy at the right timing and they want to focus on that.

Totoki-san also talked about VR, mentioning that there is room for evolution on both hardware and software sides, so Sony expects that the market is going to expand.

Sony already announced its first-party game Horizon Call of the Mountain; with PlayStation VR2‘s technology and content like Horizon, the company intends to enhance its presence in the VR market.

Then Totoki-san talked about Sony’s predictions for PS5 sales in the next fiscal year (between April 2022 and March 2021), mentioning that the market demand is high enough that it would allow achieving record-high sales.

Sony is working closely with partner companies supplying companies and they hope they can make such record performance happen, but due to the continued disruption of the supply chain, it’s impossible to say for sure what will happen next year.

That being said, Totoki-san mentioned that it’s important to have a high target. By setting a lower target Sony could relax and actually aim for that. A more exact forecast for the fiscal year 2022 will be shared down the line in the consolidated performance report. It’s worth mentioning that Sony had to slash its forecast for the current fiscal year.

Speaking of strategic investments for PlayStation, Sony is looking at the future upside potential deals may have and that is the criteria for making investment decisions, including whether they can generate a premium and how that premium can be rationalized.

In terms of scale, Sony will study closely its financial capabilities and the risks in order to decide on any investment. Asked whether they’d rather fully purchase studios or make only partial investments, Totoki-san explained that if the target is a good company, they’d like to purchase 100% of it. A more limited involvement would possibly cause issues in creating a good alliance, so Sony will consider this aiming for long-term partnerships

If you’d like to learn more about Sony’s financial performance on top of official shipment numbers for PS5 and PS4, you can check out our dedicated article.