During Sony's recent financial conference call with Japanese investors and analysts, CFO Kenichiro Yoshida shared his expectations in terms of performance for the Game & Network sector in the current fiscal year (which ends on March 31, 2017), for PS4 and PlayStation Network.
With regards to Sony's console and its network, Yoshida seems very positive and expects "that in fiscal '16 we can exceed the 17.7 million units of PS4 hardware that we sold in the previous fiscal year," although it might suffer a slight slowdown due to the devastating earthquake that hit Japan recently.
Sony, in fact, owns three factories in the areas affected by the earthquake, where they produce components for their platforms:
"For the fiscal year 2016's outlook, we expect the strong momentum of the PS4 platform to continue. Due to the impact of the earthquakes there is a possibility that the supply of components from certain vendors might be affected, but even with that impact, at this point of time, we think that in fiscal '16 we can exceed the 17.7 million units of PS4 hardware that we sold in the previous fiscal year.
Currently we are considering a variety of ways to minimize the impact of the earthquake on the results of this business."