Sony's Q4 2015 Financial Results
Sony announced their Q4 2015 earnings this week and the company had a pretty decent year. Their revenue was down 1.3%, but their operating income skyrocketed 329%. I'm not sure how Sony judges success internally, but having much higher profits on slightly lowered revenue seems pretty good. You can dig into Sony's report all you want, but I've created a couple charts that summarize Sony's 2015 at a high level.
While Sony isn't "the PlayStation company," it's still clear that more money comes from their games division than anywhere else. The next biggest part of the business brings in 25% less cash than their gaming endeavors. From a layman's perspective, this actually looks like a company that has diversified relatively well.
The other area I looks at was year-over-year growth in each of these areas, and once again their gaming division is leading the way. Not only are video games bringing in the most money, but they are also growing faster than any other division with an 11.8% increase over the previous year and an 84% increase in operating income.
The big surprise on this chart is that music is actually the second biggest grower in the company. Now Sony did publish Adele's 25, but overall digital and physical music sales dropped, which is to be expected. Sony credits increased streaming revenue as well as "Visual Media and Platform" sales.
The loser for Sony is clearly phones, as their mobile communications division saw a 20% drop in revenue over 2014. This is due to "a strategic decision not to pursue scale in order to improve profitability" and the company did indeed stem the bleeding a bit from last year. They cut their losses in mobile by 2/3, but they're still running that business at a loss.