After 14 years of seeing year-end gains, Sony has finally got hit with its first net loss in 14 years, losing $1.04 billion U.S. or 98.9 billion Yen. This is compared to the previous year profit of $3.88 Billion U.S. or 369.4 billion Yen.
The company blames the global down turn and the strong Japanese Yen for the net loss. Worldwide sales are down 12% for Sony, seeing nearly 8,000 jobs cut from its overall 185,000 staff and closing 10% of its factories. Another reason for the loss is due to the falling sales of the Sony PlayStation 2, which has been out for years, still outperforming the numbers for the Sony PlayStation 3 in many regions.
Senior managing director at Chibagin Asset Management, Fujio Andon has said "[Sony] Right now they have no 'number one products", which can hurt the company a lot, especially when Sony is involved in so many electronic markets from gaming, to televisions, digital media, Vaio PC's and portable electronics.
Sony is not the only Japanese company feeling the pinch as Hitachi announced an annual loss of $8.26 billion U.S. or 787.3 billion Yen a record for a Japanese company. All eyes are focused on Sony to see if they can recover from their deficit while Nintendo and Microsoft report positive numbers in their gaming department.
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