UPDATED 05:41 EDT / NOVEMBER 04 2011

NEWS

Sony Predicts Over $1.1 Billion Full-Year Net Loss After Numerous Setbacks

The year of 2011 has been extremely harsh for Sony and it’s been peppered with cataclysm and catastrophe. Starting with Japan’s earthquake and the resulting the tsunami that shut down production at 10 factories in March. Shortly thereafter, the PlayStation Network suffered a gigantic break-in embarrassing Sony in how terrible their online security happened to be (and it simply continued to get worse.) That incident closed down the gamer network for almost a month costing the company more than  $170 million after all the dust settled.

To absorb those costs, Sony expected that their to-year profits would stay up due to their TV division remaining in the red. However, now it looks like that may not be the case. According to a recent article in Reuters, Sony’s television unit alone is looking at losses set around $2.2 billion.

Sony said it expects TV losses to be 175 billion yen ($2.2 billion) this financial year, including a 50 billion yen impairment charge. It cut its TV sales forecast by 9 percent to 20 million sets, its second reduction this year.

“The TV business is an essential part of Sony’s growth strategy. We, as management, feel a great sense of crisis after seven straight years of losses,” Hirai, executive deputy president, told a briefing. He described this year’s losses as a necessary step toward recovery.

Hirai, appointed to the company’s No. 2 position this year, must map out a plan for earnings growth if he is to take over the top job from Welsh-born Howard Stringer, analysts said.

Following the announcement of these losses, Sony’s Japanese shares tripped and fell 3.6 percent to 1,520 yen. The market resumes trading Friday, so it might end up rising again, but looking at the overall health of the company currently, it’s not good.

Losses in both their TV division and with the PlayStation division will not bode well Sony as they’re now walking out of their fourth year of annual net loss.

Looking at how Sony has played their hand with the PSN breach, it’s a wonder that there are many fans of the company right now. In fact, in order to mitigate costs, the company decided to throw its online gaming subscribers under the bus by adding provisions to the PlayStation Network Terms of Service that try to usurp users’ rights to class action lawsuits against Sony in the case of future breaches. While we saw Jack Tretton strut his stuff in front of E3 and speak about how awesome and important the users of the PSN happened to be, we get this out of Sony Online Entertainment.

In a bit of a bright spot for Sony, the company’s Hollywood studio, Sony Pictures, managed to keep its head above water by showing a operating profit of around ¥20.6 billion (about USD $263 million). Whereas last year the studio suffered a small loss of around ¥4.8 billion (about USD $58.9 million). Although that’s hardly enough to stem the tide of bad tidings coming down the pipe for Sony.

Floods, hacking, poor TV sales, all put together has Sony predicting a total net-loss for the year to exceed ¥90 billion (about USD $1.1 billion.) Unless something dramatic happens in the next two months, Sony will be looking to next year to help recoup the staggering number of losses they’ve suffered this year.


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