In the lead-up to its fiscal year 2010 earnings report this Thursday,
Sony today released a revised forecast -- forewarning a $3.2 billion
loss (yowzah!) -- for the twelve months ending March 31, 2011. Having
occurred in late April, the PlayStation Network attack and subsequent
data theft and outage fall outside of that period, but the company
nonetheless addressed "the impact" of the event during an investors
call today, "since there have been so many media inquiries about this
incident."
"As of today," said Sony, according to its call script, "our currently
known associated costs for the fiscal year ending March 2012 are
estimated to be approximately 14 billion yen on the consolidated
operating income level." That's roughly $171 million -- a "reasonable
assumption," says Sony -- that the company expects to spend throughout
the current fiscal year on its "personal information theft protection
program," in addition to "welcome back programs," customer support,
network security "enhancements" and legal costs. Sony noted that
revenue loss from the outage and recovery, which also spans its
Qriocity and Sony Online Entertainment services, had been factored
into the cost, as well.
"So far, we have not received any confirmed reports of customer
identity theft issues, nor confirmed any misuse of credit cards from
the cyber-attack," the company added. "Those are key variables, and if
that changes, the costs could change."
And what about the class action suits? Sony qualifies them as "all at
a preliminary stage, so we are not able to include the possible
outcome of any of them in our results forecast for the fiscal year
ending March 2012 at this moment."
No comments:
Post a Comment