Saturday, July 21, 2007

Xbox 360: Sales of 360 Plunge 60% as Problems Mount

Microsoft said it shipped 700,000 Xbox 360 units in its latest fiscal quarter, compared to 1.8 million in the same quarter in 2006 -a fall of 60%. Looks like the lack of action in fixing the 360's issues may have a bigger backlash than just footing a hefty repair bill...

More after the jump

Microsoft's growing troubles with the Xbox 360 video game console appear to be catching up to the company. Sales of the gaming machine plunged 60% in the fiscal fourth quarter, Microsoft disclosed Thursday.

In its earnings statement for the quarter, Microsoft said it shipped 700,000 Xbox 360 units during the period, compared to 1.8 million in the fiscal fourth quarter of 2006 -- a fall off of 61%.

Microsoft's Xbox operations are housed within the company's Entertainment and Devices Division. The group saw fourth quarter revenue drop 10% year-over-year to $1.16 billion on an operating loss of $1.20 billion. The group lost $423 million the previous year.

Microsoft blamed the 183% increase in the EDD operating loss on a $1.06 billion charge against earnings that the company incurred to cover the cost of extending the warranty period for the Xbox 360 to three years. The move came following Microsoft's recent admission that the gaming system was suffering from an "unacceptable" number of general hardware failures. Microsoft has also been hit with two class action lawsuits in the past two weeks claiming that a design flaw in the Xbox 360 causes the system to irreparably scratch game discs. Microsoft has denied the claim.


Source

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Its kinda stupid how it doesnt mention that they were comparing the Q4 2006 sales (i.e. peak holiday season) to Q1 2007 sales -which is when no one buys anything because they're still too damned poor from xmas! Prolly written by someone at Sony...

Anonymous said...

I'm on my 2nd 360 now -the service was pretty good and I got it back within 4 weeks -although they said it would only take 2 weeks. I did get phone calls from them almost every 3 days though. Just be careful not to leave that thing running too long -although I've noticed you only seem to have a PS3...

Anonymous said...

You write very well.