The high-definition disc format war is over, but the real losers aren?t those who bought HD-DVD movies or players but Toshiba, the company behind the bested standard. The company has announced today that their net profit this past quarter dropped an astonishing 95 percent, thanks to losses prompted by the format pull-out. Overall, net profit scraped in at 1.25 billion yen (US$12 million), versus 26.17 billion yen this time last year.
Toshiba also blamed a drop in the price of flash memory chips for their ailing profits. Revenue overall for the quarter was 3-percent lower than last year, at 2.09 trillion yen (US$20billion). Total profit for the financial year up until the end of March 2008 was 127.4 billion yen (US$1.2billion), a fall of 7 percent.