Presenting Sony’s latest financial report to investors on Wednesday, executives at the company were inevitably asked about the impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs on the business, and how they were going to respond. They had a number of different answers, including raising prices — and, incredibly, they did not dismiss the idea of manufacturing PlayStation 5 in the U.S. out of hand.
“Gaming consoles […] can be produced locally. I think that would be an efficient strategy,” said Sony’s president and CEO Hiroki Totoki. “Whether [PS5] is going to be manufactured in the U.S. or not needs to be considered.”
It’s a remarkable statement, since it would likely take years and serious investment for Sony to create manufacturing capability for PS5 in America. But Totoki’s words are a sign that in the current unpredictable situation, nothing is off the table, and no ideas are bad ideas.
A more expected move might be to raise prices, and Sony admitted this was also a possibility, albeit in the vaguest possible terms. Chief financial officer Lin Tao said Sony was looking at a financial impact of 100 billion yen (about $684 million) from tariffs across its divisions. “We may pass on to the price,” she said, without singling out PS5 in particular. But she also said Sony was taking different measures, like shipment allocations, to mitigate the impact of tariffs.
Case in point: Tao said that Sony has a stockpile of PS5 consoles in the U.S. that should last for three months. This will allow it to wait out the situation for a while and see what happens, and may mean that a PS5 price increase is still months away, if it’s coming at all.
The PS5 is largely manufactured in China, which the Trump administration has subjected to higher tariffs than most other countries. This week, in a temporary de-escalation, the U.S. reduced its tariff rate on Chinese imports from 145% to 30% for the next 90 days. That’s encouraging news, but it also highlights the unpredictability of the situation — which is what has electronics manufacturers like Sony and Nintendo scrambling for answers. On Tuesday, Nintendo essentially said that it would take a hit on tariffs rather than raising prices as it usually would, because it was in the launch year for the Switch 2 and didn’t want to slow down the new console’s momentum.
In summary: Company executives are as clueless about what’s going on as the rest of us and are mostly heading steady and hoping for the best. As analyst Mat Piscatella put it on Bluesky: “Big takeaway from latest video game earnings statements around the tariff situation is that a) no one is confident in predicting what will happen next b) folks are carrying multiple scenario plans, but trying to stay the course if possible c) everyone is hoping it all just goes away.”
Well, we can all relate to that.
