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Sony’s latest financials have revealed a bright 12 months for the company’s games business.
For the fiscal year ended March 31st, the platform holder reported 14.8 million unit sales for PS4.
This is almost double the 7.5 million seen in FY2013, although given that the console was only around for the last two quarters of that year, it seems that sales of the hardware have remained pretty consistent.
Q3 of FY2014, which encapsulated the Christmas period, was unsurprisingly the best quarter for PS4, with the console shifting 6.4 million units worldwide.
Overall, the PS4 has now shipped 22.3 million units globally.
Sony added its expectation that 16 million PS4 consoles would be sold over the next year, an increase of 1.2 million year-on-year.
Q3 FY2014 was also the most successful period for Sony’s portable hardware, with the launch of the PlayStation TV propelling the sector to 1.4 million combined sales, also including PSP and Vita. The division managed 3.3 million unit sales in total during FY2014.
All of this helped Sony’s PlayStation business achieve an operating profit of 48.1 billion yen (261.5 million) – a huge increase over the prior year’s 18.8 billion yen (100 million) loss.
Sony attributed the growth to a ‘significant’ increase in PlayStation Plus revenue and increased PS4 software and hardware sales, partially as a result of consumers moving away from the PS3.
However, the division is expected to shrink slightly during the next financial year, with profit dropping to 40 billion yen (220 million).
Sony as a whole predicts its income to more than quadruple over the next 12 months, rising to 320 billion yen (1.7bn) from 68.5 billion yen (370 million) for the last year.
However, this isbelow previous analyst predictions for FY2015, which had pegged the company to reach 401.6 billion yen (2.2 billion) in profit.
