Sony stock slides to 30-year low after record loss

Investors unsure tired corp can turn things around

By Brid-Aine Parnell, 11th May 2012

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Sony shares dropped to a 30-year low on the Tokyo Stock Exchange today after reporting a record loss of $5.7bn.

The Japanese tech goliath predicts the first profit in five years in 2013, but investors seem unconvinced that the company can turn around its TV business and make any inroads into the smartphone market.

Its shares slid 6.43 per cent to 1,135 yen. Sony stock has lost 38 per cent of its value since this year's high on March 16 of 1,832 yen.

The hits have kept on coming for Sony, with insipid consumer appetite for big ticket tellies, PCs and laptops, increased competition in the gaming industry from smartphones and social networks, natural disasters like the 2011 earthquake and the floods in Thailand and that ever-strong yen, which stamps down its overseas profits.

The company has also seemed to lack imagination in its products, failing to produce a popular smartphone, making no impact in tablets and exciting no one in the TV business enough to ignore their economic fears.

Sony hopes that new leadership under president Kazuo Hirai, who used to run the gaming division, and a cost-cutting programme that includes 10,000 job losses will see it return to profitability next year. ®

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Highly Rated

Posted Friday 11th May 2012 14:16 GMT

Ogi

Re: Stop Shafting Your Customers

Corrected the title for you.

Sony has royally shafted all their customers. Back in 1992 when minidisc came out, it could have taken the world by storm. Smaller than a tape, CD-quality sound (good enough anyway), can't scratch the disk as it in a case, recordable, even in the field!

By all intents and purposes it should have taken over from both tape and CD, but noo, Sony had to cripple it with proprietary lockouts, and even go so far to split the format in "Minidisc-data" and "minidisk-audio", and go so far as to prevent people making computer drives that could write minidisk-audio (nobody bothered with minidisc-data as a consequence).

talk about shooting yourself in the foot. Sony could have owned the media market pre-mp3 (and then had the clout to sustain and perhaps embrace the mp3 revolution). Instead the blew their leg off and continued to stagger on until the late 90's.

Once again, mp3's came out, rather than embrace them they made their own lossy format (Atrac), but once again cripped it with DRM and you had to use only their windows software (sonicstage was it?) which was a POS like no other (you had to check songs in and out, and if you checked it out 3 times, that was it, you can't listen to it anymore). Buggy as hell.

So now Sony blew their other leg off, and finally adopted mp3 (long after Apple and others had left them in the dust). Panicking now, they had the wonderful idea of rootkitting your PC if you stuck a Sony CD in there, for god forbid you wanted to rip it to an mp3! They ballsed the mp3 revolution up, so now have to stop you from doing it.

Great! So now they blew an arm off as well, another arm went with the otherOS and PS3, and well.. quite frankly they've run out of limbs.

I stopped with the minidiscs, and since the rootkit fiasco refused to pay Sony (and its sister companies) a cent. Forget about the shock of their share price plummeting, I'm amazed they survived this long. I assume it was momentum they built up from a time in the 80's when they built damn good quality hifi and electrical equipment... because most smaller firms would have collapsed years ago from this level of mismanagement and micromanaged freakery.

Posted Friday 11th May 2012 13:51 GMT

Anomynous Coward