Im heute morgen veröffentlichten Finanzbericht nimmt Sony Computer Entertainment erstmals offiziell zu den Kosten, welche durch den Hacker-Angriff verursacht wurden, Stellung.
Die Hacker-Attacke schlägt, gemäss Finanzbericht, mit über 14 Milliarden Yen (ca. 150 Millionen Schweizer Franken) zu buche. Bei der Summe handelt es sich aktuell nur um eine Prognose, welche die Kosten bis zum Ende des aktuellen Finanzjahres, welches erst am 31. März 2012 endet, einbezieht. Zudem dürften darin nur die direkten Kosten eingerechnet worden sein.
Based on information currently available to Sony, our currently known costs associated with the unauthorized network access are estimated to be approximately 14 billion yen in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2012.Analysten vermuten einen möglichen Schaden von über 2 Milliarden us$.
*Next, I would like to briefly address the impact on our financial results of the unauthorized access to the PlayStation Network, Qriocity and Sony online Entertainment network services that occurred this April, since there have been so many media inquires about this incident.
As of today, 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. The estimated amount includes the following items:
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. To date, however, we have not confirmed such misuse of personal information.
In addition to this program cost, there are:
- Costs of welcome back programs that offer our customers certain services (such as games, music and videos) for free
3/3 - Customer support costs
- Network security enhancement costs
Legal and expert costs, and
The impact on our profits due to a possible future revenue decrease.
These amounts are our reasonable assumption based on the information currently available to Sony. 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. Those are key variables, and if that changes, the costs could change. In addition, in connection with the data breach, class action lawsuits have been filed against Sony and certain of its subsidiaries and regulatory inquiries have begun; however, those are 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.
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