(News Bulletin 247) – To better focus on the development of its entertainment activities, Sony plans to list its financial services on the stock market in the fall of 2025.

Sony on Wednesday raised its annual net profit forecast thanks to its financial services business, which it plans to list on the stock market in 2025, also recognizing the slowdown in sales of its PlayStation 5 console.

The Japanese giant is preparing a partial split of its financial services division, in particular to better focus on its activities in entertainment (video games, cinema, music, etc.) and image sensors, defined as its “preferred areas “.

It wishes to distribute around 80% of the shares of its financial services activity to its shareholders in the form of dividends in kind after the split planned for May 2025, and wants to introduce this entity on the stock market in October 2025, retaining almost 20% of the capital .

The group now expects for the entire 2023/2024 financial year which will end at the end of March on an annual net profit of 920 billion yen (5.7 billion euros), a little better than the 880 billion yen forecast during its last forecast in November. This nevertheless represents a decline of 8.5% compared to the 2022/2023 financial year when the net profit reached 1,005 billion yen.

But Sony still expects an operating profit of 1,170 billion yen (7.3 billion euros, -3.2% over one year), and has very slightly lowered its sales forecast to 12,300 billion yen (76 .3 billion euros), which would represent an increase of 12.1% over one year.

PS5 sales lower than expected

Sony has especially reduced the turnover forecast for its video game division, due to lower than expected sales of its PlayStation 5 console. It now only plans to sell 21 million PS5s across the entire market. current financial year, compared to a previous target of 25 million copies.

It announced in December that it had reached the milestone of 50 million PS5s sold since the release at the end of 2020 of this console, whose production has long been disrupted by the shortage of semiconductors and global disruptions in supply chains.

But the dynamic is staggering, despite the occasional support provided by successful games like “Marvel’s Spider-man 2”, released last October, which has already sold more than 10 million copies.

As the PS5 enters the second half of its life cycle, “we expect a gradual decline in volume sales from the next fiscal year onwards,” Sony COO Hiroki Totoki admitted at a conference Press.

“While major projects are currently in development, we do not anticipate releasing new titles from major existing franchises in the next fiscal year, such as “God of War Ragnarok” and “Marvel’s Spider Man 2,” he said. -he also declared.

Sony also launched a more compact and lighter model of its console last November, with identical performance but with a little more storage space.

No comments on Michael Jackson’s catalog

The group did not comment Wednesday on information revealed by several media in recent days, according to which it had acquired the rights to half of Michael Jackson’s song catalog for more than 600 million dollars.

This transaction would value the catalog of the “king of pop”, who died in 2009, between 1.2 and 1.5 billion dollars, a new record in the music industry, according to the specialist magazine Billboard.

In the third quarter (October-December), Sony achieved a net profit of 363.9 billion yen, up 13% year-on-year.

It saw its operating profit increase 10% to 463.3 billion yen, and its sales climb 22% to 3,747.5 billion yen.

(With AFP)