There’s no secret that Sony was and still is losing money on its PS3 hardware, although much less so these days than they used to.

The BOM (Build of Materials) cost has more than halved over the two years the console has been on the market. The original 60GB version set back Sony US$840 a unit, while the company sold them for US$599. Today, things aren’t as grim, as the current 40GB SKU is costing Sony a lot less at US$400 a unit, which is less than half of that of the original model.

Several hardware changes have been made since then and gone is the hardware, PS2 Emotion Engine as well as some other bits that weren’t deemed cost effective. Rambus has also helped tweak the system costs, as they’ve been heavily involved with both the bus and the memory architecture of the console.

Today, Sony isn’t really losing any money on the console, but it seems like the company is still some time off from making money on the hardware sales; and one has to wonder how much money the company has lost if you take into account that the 40GB SKU is the third or possibly fourth iteration of the console, depending if you count the Emotion Engine-less European version or not.

This doesn’t include things like R&D, developing a new smaller motherboard for the new versions, manufacturing costs, packaging and shipping, marketing, etc. In Sony’s defense, they’ve still managed to shift 12.81 million consoles and counting, but they still have a long way to go to recuperate all that lost money. For Sony’s sake, let’s hope they score a couple of real blockbusters, as they seem to need it.