So what, Toshiba waved the flag of surrender on the HD-DVD and Blu-ray battlefield, but that couldn’t possibly mean Toshiba would suffer too terribly, right? Wrong. Instead of splashing some peroxide on the wound, slapping a band-aid on it and springing right back, it seems that Toshiba is sitting in some dark room nursing its mortal wound of 95% profit loss since HD-DVD went belly up.

According to the International Herald Tribune, Toshiba reported a sickly 1.25 billion yen in profit, down from a much more expected point of 26.17 billion yen just a year earlier. Not to muddy the yen pot for those of you who don’t carry yen in your wallets, purses, clasps or what have you, but the amount of money lost simply from having to discontinue HD-DVD cost Toshiba a jaw-dropping 48 billion yen ($461 million).

Most of the losses associated with discontinuing HD-DVD came from dealing with leftover inventory as well as shutting down assembly lines, and assumedly cutting jobs in the process. Worst of all might be that the company was already pretty deep in operating loss for the fiscal year ending March 31, reporting 60.2 billion yen lost to operational costs.

While companies like Wal-Mart and Best Buy try to appease customers by offering return deals for those who feel rather hung out to dry after purchasing HD-DVD players, Toshiba seems to be feeling the real brunt of the technology’s death (which is to be expected).

It would be quite interesting to project Sony’s losses if Blu-ray had lost the HD disc technology war; consider that even though HD-DVD disc drives were manufactured for Xbox 360s, the integration of Blu-ray players into Playstation 3s could have really crippled Sony.

Maybe that, all along, was the problem with HD-DVDs approach; if HD-DVD players had been integrated to 360s, would the format have had a better chance? Maybe Microsoft played a very large part in HD-DVDs death by not integrating the drives.

The positive thing for Toshiba is that there’s really nowhere to go but up from here. Of course there’s bankruptcy or selling out, but what kind of “glass half full” mentality would that be?

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Entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 12:23 pm under High Definition Formats, Opinion, Retail.

Read more entries by Triston McIntyre.
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