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Microsoft Loses $177m on Xbox in Three Months
Albanach writes "The BBC News are reporting in this story that Microsoft's Home Entertainment Division has filed a submission to the Securities and Exchange Commission reporting a loss of $177 million for the three months to 30 September 2002. The loss comes on revenues of $505m for the division that manufactures the Xbox games console. Microsoft are said to be prepared to spend $2 billion funding Xbox live over the next five years, suggesting it will be some time before the home entertainment division break into the black."
That's probably less than billg's annual pizza budget.
or is there something actually legitimate about this? Granted there's stiff competition in the home console market, but MS was throwing consoles at people in hopes that they'd recoup their losses with the sale of games. to hear that they're losing money with game sales seems odd to me.
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This is of course, how Microsoft takes over a marketplace. They are eternally funded, and can oulast anyone.
They'll chip away at Sony and Nintendo's profits until even these successful companies can't make a profit.
I wonder why they're trying to pull out of the DVR market. They say that there's no money in it. Maybe. I thinks that maybe it conflicts with their DRM agenda.
You're right, I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars *next* year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years.
-- Charles Foster Kane
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Billy Henderson always wins, 'cause his dad's the scout leader.
One of the tactics Standard Oil would employ was to sell oil and petroleum products well below cost, absorbing the loss for the sake of driving competitors to the point of ruin, and then buying their ruined competitors' assets.
Sony is a strong, powerful company. Nintendo is slightly less so. I think, however, that if you were to do a direct comparison, Microsoft has the ability to lose more money and stay solvent for longer than either Sony or Nintendo.
This tactic was found to be in violation of the Sherman act when applied to Standard oil. It's amazing to me that MS is able to get away with the same thing without its competitors screaming more loudly at the US government.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
an abusive monopoly. No other company can just throw this kind of money away in this market. The only reason why people are not saying something is because Sony is actually beating Microsoft's stupidity.
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
Yea, I'm waiting for them to go into fast food. Give McDonald's a run for their money.
Just think, a free 2-day Serial Key to MS-Office with every BillyBurger sold!
" ... redefine business loss. ... it's an expense. Not a loss. They will get it back ..."
... who knows what can happen in five years ... So, you see, it is in the best interest of everyone for losses like this to continue to be reported for exactly what they are: immediate losses on a long term gamble with no guarantee on seeing the money again.
No, they need to report this as a loss. Look, the Xbox division is a gamble by the larger company to enter into the home entertainment market. As with any gamble it contains a significant amount of risk. This loss quanitifies exactly how large a risk and let's the shareholders and prospective investors have some insight into how the gamble is going. Perhaps, this whole experiment will bomb
I'm surprised that's even legal?!
Even if that's not a lot of money for MS, in Belgium it's forbidden to sell products for less money than you needed to produce it...
It's unfair competition.
If they put Playstation and Nintendo out of business because they don't have the money to use this trick, some American judge should finally see what MS is doing and give them a REAL punishment...
according to The Register's article here the losses are minimal, when compared with the operating income MS gets from Windows, Office and their Server products. The numbers are (quoting the register):
:)
Windows: $2.48 billion on $2.89 billion revenue
Office: $1.88 billion on $2.38 billion revenue
Servers: $519 million on $1.52 billion revenue
compare that with a loss of $177 (and microsoft lost on many other things, like CE/Mobility) and you'll see that the picture is not as bad as it looks (heh, for them, anyway)...
Slashdot is aiming for the sensationalism value again, but that's nothing new now, is it?
As the story at the Register points out, any other business with ventures losing money like Xbox and MSN would kill them off as clearly bad business decisions.
A company willing and able to sustain hundreds of millions of dollars poured down a holes that are peripherally related to their core business of PC software, for years at a time, is crazy.
A company willing and able to do that against large, established business like AOL/Time Warner and Sony is downright scary.
A normal business, run to increase profits, would look at the margins on Office and Windows and simply jack up their prices. It's an iron-clad guarantee to increase profits at MSFT. There is virtually zero price elasticity of demand for Windows and Office and MSFT management owes it to their shareholders to optimize profits by taking advantage of their stranglehold on the market.
[Note: I don't own any MSFT.]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
It's bad from a PR perspective. It's bad considering that Nintendo and Sony are now actually turning a profit on the consoles, a slim one but a profit nonetheless. Sony has managed to fit the entire Emotion Engine + CPU + sundry other parts onto a single chip, which reduces cost significantly. I'm not sure how Nintendo has pulled it off.
Xbox Live is doing better than expected, but the total numbers are pretty intimidating for MS. Last I checked (2 weeks ago), the score is:
- approximately 8 million GameCubes
- approximately 10 million XBoxen
- approximately 52 million PlayStation 2s
By those numbers, it's safe to say Sony has wrapped up this round, if you're looking for a 'winner'. 5X the market share is too compelling for game designers. The games go where the customers are.
[tangent]
I like the Xbox, even if it is a little limited in scope. There's a completely different philosophy at work at Sony's computer entertainment division that I don't think MS really understands. The Xbox is basically a kickass 3D sandbox. The PS2 is a super-flexible games machine; by this I mean that the PS2 is oriented for all kinds of games, not just 3D. The PMUs for example, can generate procedural textures on the fly. Take the oft-lamented VRAM issue. VRAM holds lots of shiny textures. But what if you are generating textures from (basically) pure math? No texture overhead. (Bryce 3D, to name a weird example, gets away almost entirely without using graphical textures.)
And now we see Sony moving fast to innovate in areas that Microsoft basically can't... namely, they've gone and asked IBM for a radically different kind of chip. MS is in no position to do this, as part of their whole pitch is the fact that it's a PC in a box, with MS's x86 programming tools.
[/tangent]
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
According to the 10-Q filing, the article is wrong. The $177M net loss is for all of home and entertainment, only a subset of which is Xbox. In fact, comparing it to last year, where the losses were at $68 M and there was NO xbox, you can conclude that total losses resulting from xbox activities would not be greater than $109 M, and in fact probably even less than that. There are many other things in the home and entertainment division such as Windows Media Center PC, UltimateTV, MSN TV, and so on, many of which were probably not profitable, and contributed to the overall losses.
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No its not legal.
America has so called anti dumping laws.
However they get only applied if a non american company tries to sell for dumping prices inside of the US.
E.g. Korean car manufactors selling 30% cheaper than US car manufactors or VCR crafting companies regulary got a punishment import tax.
The US puts taxes at will on any kind of product if they think their own industrie soffers from forreign laws. E.g. genetic manipulated Soja needs to be noted as incridience in european food(by law). Europeans as majority do not buy genetic manipulated food. Feeding animals with genetic manipulated food is not allowed, as it gets to difficult to prove its absence in the final products (like ham). Result: US is threatening europe with a tax war since years just because Soja sales droped in Europe.
However: what is legal and what not, all over the world, is final descided by a US court.
Silly situation.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Keep it open, stupid
This directly opposes Focus on getting better games. While one or two good games might come from Joe and Tom working in their bedrooms for 8 months straight, most of todays games are massive efforts and the cost for playing helps to ensure that only those who are truely serious will play. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to get my mitts on a dev kit cheaply, but games today are way more complex than the average person/small team can effectively deal with.
Manufacturing Xboxes that defeat region encoding and macrovision with small modifications would cause sales to skyrocket
Me thinks that your definition of "skyrocket" and M$'s definition of "skyrocket" might be orders of magnitude different. Who in the US (general game playing population) gives a flip about region encoding? Sure, beating Macrovision might be interesting and sell a few more boxes, but it's a GAME BOX, those features have no interest to GAMERS. This is especially accute concerning M$, since even as you mentioned they have made little inroads in Japan, and after all, isn't getting those hot Japanese titles months before they come here one of the primary reasons that the hardcore gamers care about region encoding.
Microsoft needs to switch to AMD or Transmeta chips, which pack more power for the buck, run cooler
Uh, which AMD chip runs cooler? Which Transmeta chip packs more power for the buck? Do you know the details for M$'s agreement with Intel to know if they could truely save money by switching. Could the other two companies afford to offer prices as low as Intel could?
Also, this will allow them to use cheaper graphics coprocessors by using a cheaper, more powerful main CPU
Isn't this bucking the trend? Aren't games systems moving towards ever more powerful graphics subsystems with modest increases in cpu performance. Sony gets away with using a ~300mhz (IIRC) cpu, I don't think that the console makers are too stressed out about raw CPU performance.
but if Microsoft takes these suggestions, their Xbox division will be well on its way to profitability
They need to produce better games than Sony and offer the user a better experience for the buck and most importantly, they need market share. The power of the last point is elegantly illustrated by Sony. PS1 was the market share (though long money losing) vehicle that allowed Sony to start cashing in once PS1 was established thus smoothing the road to much quicker profitability on PS2.
As far as American law is concerned, there's an ongoing trade dispute over stumpage fees charged by the Canadian government to Canadian softwood producers. The US government has lost in the courts 18 times, but still fights it, arguing that the lower stumpage fees allow Canadian companies to sell lumber at below actual cost, and hurts American producers.
In British Columbia (A Canadian Province), the stumpage fees go to the government. The government then uses the money to ensure adequate regulation of the companies. Cutblocks get re-planted, streams are protected, roads are deactivated. The problem is that in the US, they have a auction systems for timber. Private landholders auction their lumber from their private land holdings. Not only do they have to do their own re-planting (adding expense) they also require a profit. (Adding more expense)
When you look at the lumber barons who are doing the lobbying in Washington, most are from the southeastern US. They sell inferior quality wood compared to BC softwood. THeir product is also higher cost, mainly because they refused to spend the money to upgrade their mills. So they produce a low grade, high cost product (very labor intensive) that simply cannot compete in the marketplace. The BC mills spent billions upgrading their mills to be highly efficient. Now they are being penalized for their foresight.
Inevitably, whenever a US industry gets into a non-competitive situation where they can't dominate, out come the lawyers and the lobbyists. (steel) The WTO will overturn this tariff. Until then, thousands of workers and business' in British Columbia will suffer.
Did I mention that the average new house in the US is costing $3K-$5K more? They don't tell you that in Businessweek do they?
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
I object to the American populace losing ~$100M of tax money from Microsoft because Microsoft purposefully and deliberately priced the Xbox so low they knew they would have this loss.
Look at from a longer-term view. Microsoft does not intend to lose money forever. They want the books to be positive at the end of the day. The government allowing Microsoft to deduct losses now is an attempt to help Microsoft to become profitable in the future. Profitable in the future means revenues to the government. It doesn't do the government any good if they kill companies in the start-up phases before they get a chance to produce taxes.
$100M could do a lot towards fixing our schools so there aren't 55 kids in a kindergarden class. It's a start...
Two things to say about this:
1) It wouldn't do anything for the schools, since this is mostly federal taxes. Schools are locally financed (although, the feds have been sticking their nose more and more where they shouldn't lately)
2) I'd rather have Microsoft grow and create jobs for the parents of the children, rather than have the government take MORE of our money. The government has more than enough money to fix the schools. Insist on efficiency, not higher taxes.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It's obvious that Microsoft is trying to adopt the business philosophies of Linux-based companies in order to better compete with Linux. The idea of losing millions with a slim chance of attaining profitability in the distant future is something that companies like VA Software, Lineo, etc have been very good at.
The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit.
No, Sony does not and never has sold at a loss. Please stop perpetuating this myth.
Info here.
To sum it up, most people (at this point) believe that Sony still makes at least $50 per console sold, Nintendo is just about breaking even, and Microsoft is still losing at least $70 per console sold. (this is taking into account drops in production prices, drops in sale prices, etc).
-[Blaine]- "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
It's all an investment.
How much do you think Microsoft lost on Internet Explorer through its first three or four versions?
How much did that end up costing Netscape?
Of course, even taking the dynamics of the bubble into consideration, Sony has much deeper pockets than Netscape ever did...
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Otherwise Sony (being the only vertically integrated of the three companies) would be the only one able to sell their console at a low price.
Look, I hate MS as much as anyone, but romaticizing Sony or Nintendo as good guys is a pretty biased view.
If people really cared about the good guys winning the console war, people would've bought more Dreamcasts. Since they didn't win, you just have to go on which one has the games you want.
Besides, we're not talking about Wal-Mart selling drugs below cost to drive the local competition out of business; we're talking about a "give the razor, sell the blades" pricing model here.
There's a world of difference.
Scott
Even if it did not have this huge amount of cash on hand the $3.5 billion profits from its operating system and software divisions in the quarter more than offset any loss.
I imagine billg broke into a cold sweat when he heard the news of this financial catastrophe...
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
Common, if you're gonna hit microsoft on this practice, you're going to have to hit Nintendo, Sony and the late-great Sega on it as well. They all sell their consoles at a loss in order to hit the consumer's impulse buy range. The only real difference here is that Microsoft has deeper pockets with which to do this with. It gives them the ability to market superior hardware while hitting the same impulse buy zone. And yes, it also creates hideously large loss numbers.
As for putting Sony and Nintendo out of business, somebody really isn't in touch with the real world. First, the XBox is nearly dead last in console sales. That differential will decrease over time, but unless Sony and Nintendo do something incredibly stupid or MS incredibly brilliant, that's not likely to change in this round of the console wars. Second, Sony is a big boy. It has a diversified market beyond gaming. Their products have global reach and ideal penetration within their respected markets. Sony isn't going anywhere. Nintendo, on the other hand, has a far smaller foundation and hasn't exactly been making stellar decisions as of late. They haven't had a great console since the SNES, and the Gameboy is STILL their principle source of income. They're more likely to kill themselves off rather than be a victim of any MS "dumping" campaign that everybody else also seems to be engaged in.
But it's just another day in the anti-MS neighborhood, I guess...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Uhh, no, if you read it you'd notice that of $175 they were making per console, roughly $120 was from the console itself. $55 was from software and accessories.
Sony is not stupid. They do not sell at a loss. Sega sold at a loss and is now defunct as a hardware business. Nintendo sold the Gamecube at a slight loss but most accounts have them as about even now. Microsoft has billions it can throw down the drain, and so it sells at a loss.
Also, just a FYI, when Nintendo sells at a small loss it is almost meaningless to them, and I'll tell you why:
When a game is sold for $50, maybe $20 of it is profit. Of that, typically the console maker gets $5, and the game producer gets $15. However, Nintendo is in a special position in that it makes most of the really popular games for it's own console. Thus, if they sell at a $20 loss (which is about twice what most people estimated), but you buy the Gamecube and a single Nintendo produced game (which I guarantee you will), they've broken even, because they get all $20 of profit.
Microsoft, on the other hand, does not produce the games. Therefore, even if you are nice and say they're only losing $30 per console (which is way below most estimates), they need to sell 6 games just to break even. How many people do you know who have 6 XBox games? I don't know any. Every person I know with an XBox has less than 5 games, and typically has bought a single extra controller. Every person I know with a Gamecube has at least 5-6 games and most of them also buy 3 extra controllers due to the number of good 4 player games.
Something tells me MS is the only company really digging itself into a hole in the console business right now.
-[Blaine]- "'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."
I'm sorry, but this is a pet peeve of mine. Every idiot in the world speaks authoritatively about dumping when they have no idea whatsoever what it actually is.
Here's a hint: "Selling a product at a loss" is not dumping. Not even a little bit. If you produced a product and gave it away for free, that still wouldn't be dumping.
Dumping is very simple: It is selling a product in a foreign market for less than you normally sell it for in your domestic market. If you don't believe me ask the World Trade Organization. So unless you believe that MS is selling the Xbox cheaper overseas (hint: they're not), MS is not dumping.
You may now all return to your ignorant, dogmatic lives.