Japanese electronics giant Sony has lowered its earnings forecast due to a slowdown in its Playstation business and weak results from financial transactions.
The company is now expecting a profit of 800 billion yen for the fiscal year running until the end of March, i.e. the equivalent of 5.8 billion euros.
That would be a drop of 9.3 percent.
In May, however, Sony had still assumed net profit of 830 billion yen.
At the start of the pandemic, the gaming business had been growing rapidly as people spent more time at home.
It is now clear that the level at that time cannot be maintained.
Sales of Playstation software fell by a good quarter to 47.1 million games year-on-year.
Sony cut the forecast for the operating profit of the games division in the current fiscal year from 305 to 255 billion yen.
Missing chips burden Playstation sales
In the past quarter, Sony sold 2.4 million Playstation 5 devices.
That was better than the previous quarter with two million consoles, but was well below the 3.9 million from the Christmas quarter.
Launched in November 2020, the model is still hard to come by due to the chip shortage.
Group sales should increase by 15.9 percent to 11.5 trillion yen in the current fiscal year, Sony predicted.
In the first business quarter, Sony posted a bottom line profit of 218.2 billion yen, an increase of three percent over the same period last year.
Revenue rose 2.4 percent to 2.31 trillion yen.