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Business News Labels & Publishers
Sony Corp losses lessen
By Chris Cooke | Published on Monday 11 February 2013
The latest quarterly financial report from Japan’s Sony Corp provided some glimmers of hope after several years of doom and gloom, with net losses down to 10.8 billion yen (£73 million) for the last quarter of 2011, compared to losses of 158 billion yen for the same quarter a year earlier. Sales were also up 6% to 1.9 trillion yen.
As previously reported, despite the music and film industries having had a challenging few years, it’s not Sony’s mainly US-based global entertainment businesses that have been causing problems for the Tokyo-based parent company. Rather, a slump in the fortunes of the group’s traditional cash cows in consumer electronics, and especially in the television set space, has hit the firm hard, as it has also had to tackle issues thrown up by a strong yen and various natural disasters.
Arguably a weakening of the yen was the key factor in Sony seeing some improvements in the latter part of 2012, which resulted in a very mixed response in investment circles to the latest announcement, despite losses for the last nine months being 75% down on the previous same period – investment types also looking for revenue boosts that come from product innovations.