Xbox One costs $ 90 more than the PS4 to manufacture

The company IHS has just completed a detailed analysis of the manufacturing costs of two new consoles (Xbox One and PS4). It appears that Microsoft does not earn money virtually on the sale of its new model Xbox One.

Sold $ 499 in the U.S. market , the new gaming console made ​​by Microsoft last week cost $ 471 to manufacture , or $ 90 more than its competitor Sony PS4. This means that Microsoft will not have much leeway in the event of a price war, at least for the moment. IHS describes the various components that explain this difference. The first of them is obviously absent from the Kinect sensor PS4 and costs about $ 75. The most expensive component for both consoles is the AMD processor but the Xbox is a little more expensive ($ 10) with the presence of the GPU but it absents in PS4  . Xbox makes up for the cost of memory it uses DDR3 against GDDR5 in the Sony console , or $ 28 more . Among the various suppliers involved in manufacturing the Xbox One, Texas Instruments is the main with 6 components including 4 for the console itself and 2 for Kinect. It then comes Semiconductor providing 4 components.

Microsoft loss of 1 billion dollars

We can see that with a cost at $ 471, and given the discounts that Microsoft is obligated to make to the distribution network, selling consoles at a loss occurs. Rick Sherlung, analyst at Nomura Securities quoted by the Wall Street Journal, said that Microsoft could lose 1 billion dollars during the year by counting the costs of research and development, marketing and sales. This is nothing new, already in the past, Microsoft had lost money on hardware but had largely caught up with the sale of games. Furthermore, the component prices will drop and the sale of equipment should be beneficial in the future once development costs amortized.