Sony to Increase LCD TV Shipments by 19%

After experiencing several years of losses in television manufacturing, Sony SNE hopes to turn things around by shipping 16 million televisions during the fiscal 2013 sales period. According to DigiTimes, this is a 19 percent increase over last year when Sony shipped 13.5 million LCD TVs. Aside from the new shipment goal, the company will not focus on quotas throughout the year. Instead, Sony will reportedly focus on producing "high-end niche products that will give the company high profit margins, added industry sources." Those products include a new line of Bravia televisions, along with various Ultra HD displays. Earlier this year, Sony was believed to be interested in shipping as many as 16 million PlayStation 4 units this fall. That rumor was contradicted by a later report claiming that PS4 units could be scarce. While PlayStation 3 was very costly for Sony, the company does not expect to incur any significant losses from the launch of its next console. "Unlike PS3, we are not planning a major loss to be incurred with the launch of PS4," said Sony CFO Masaru Kato, as quoted by Eurogamer during a recent earnings call. "At the time we developed PS3, we made a lot of in-house investments to develop the chip, the Cell chip. Development of the chip saw the silicon processing and all the facilities invested by us ourselves. "But this time, yes we have a team working on chip development, but we already have existing technology to incorporate and also product investment and all the facilities will now be invested by our partners, other foundries, so we don't have to make all the investment in-house." One of Sony's most important partners is AMD AMD. The company is poised to make billions of dollars on the lifetime sales of PlayStation 4, which could sell 50 million to 100 million units over the next five years. AMD chips are featured in virtually every game console produced and are expected to appear in Microsoft's MSFT next-generation Xbox. NVIDIA NVDA, which once competed for the game console business that AMD currently dominates, has all but exited the video game hardware industry. This was partially due to the hefty expenses that are associated with console manufacturing, particularly PlayStation 4. Louis Bedigian is the Senior Tech Analyst and Features Writer of Benzinga. You can reach him at 248-636-1322 or louis(at)benzingapro(dot)com. Follow him @LouisBedigianBZ