Sony lifts forecast as gaming profit doubles, PS5 sales tick up, and tariff fears ease
Sony shares are trading 5% higher today after the company raised its full-year operating profit forecast, thanks to a smaller-than-expected tariff hit and strong performance in its gaming division.
The Japanese company reported that operating profit for fiscal Q1 (covering April to June) rose 36.5% to 340 billion yen — beating Wall Street’s 288 billion yen estimate — and raised its full-year operating income forecast by 4% to 1.33 trillion yen. Sony also lowered its projected tariff impact from 100 billion yen (estimated in May) to 70 billion yen, following the US-Japan trade agreement in July.
The gaming segment was the standout, with operating profit more than doubling to 148 billion yen, up from 65.2 billion yen a year earlier.
The entertainment giant sold 2.5 million PS5 units in Q1, up 4% from the prior year. That makes for better reading than Q4 ’24, when PS5 sales had slumped 38% year over year — following one of Sony’s worst video game launches in recent memory. As of June, the PS5’s total lifetime sales reached 80.3 million, edging closer to the PS3’s 87.4 million milestone (though still nowhere near the 160 million units that the record-shattering PS2 sold).
Still, while selling a few more PS5 consoles is nice, what tends to really level up the company’s earnings is revenue from third-party games sales and subscriptions, with Sony executives saying the company is “moving away from a hardware-centric business” during its earnings call. Last week, rival Nintendo reported that its Switch 2 console sales more than doubled in the April-June quarter.
The entertainment giant sold 2.5 million PS5 units in Q1, up 4% from the prior year. That makes for better reading than Q4 ’24, when PS5 sales had slumped 38% year over year — following one of Sony’s worst video game launches in recent memory. As of June, the PS5’s total lifetime sales reached 80.3 million, edging closer to the PS3’s 87.4 million milestone (though still nowhere near the 160 million units that the record-shattering PS2 sold).
Still, while selling a few more PS5 consoles is nice, what tends to really level up the company’s earnings is revenue from third-party games sales and subscriptions, with Sony executives saying the company is “moving away from a hardware-centric business” during its earnings call. Last week, rival Nintendo reported that its Switch 2 console sales more than doubled in the April-June quarter.
