In an investor earnings call, Sony has predicted that the attack on the PSN will cost the company 14 billion yen (171.4 million USD) when fiscal year 2012 ends next March. Ouch. Sony explained that said costs “are our reasonable assumption based on the information currently available”. They then proceeded to read off a list of the individual costs associated with that figure.
- First, there is the current estimated cost of the personal information theft protection program for our customers. This program includes a set amount of insurance to cover a certain amount of identity theft losses that may be incurred by our customers in certain regions within a set period with respect to misuse of their personal information.
- Costs of welcome back programs that offer our customers certain services (such as games, music and videos) for free
- Customer support costs
- Network security enhancement costs
- Legal and expert costs
- The impact on our profits due to a possible future revenue decrease.
That’s a lot of expenses, and all of the class-action lawsuits aren’t even included in that list. The reason for that is because “those are all at a preliminary stage, so we are not able to include the possible outcome of any of them”. So it’s not unthinkable for the costs to soar well beyond that $171.4 million.
Although the PSN outage is not attributable as a cause of it, you many also be interested to hear that Sony estimates a 260 billion yen (that’s a whopping $3.18 billion) loss for this past fiscal year. This despite reporting 200 billion yen in income — an increase of 6.3 times the previous year’s amount. Amazingly, the firm claims that this loss will not have any sort of negative impact on its long-term goals.
Despite numerous reports to the contrary, the electronics giant also noted that they “have not received any confirmed reports of customer identity theft issues”. They also have not confirmed any cases of malicious use of customer credit cards by third parties. So that’s some good news for all of us with PSN, SOE and/or Qriocity accounts.
[Soure: Sony]
[Image courtesy of Ars Technica.]
