Guest post by Sony just reported that through the fourth quarter of 2008, their profits plummeted a staggering 95%, losing $1.67 billion. The reported down profits were taken from last year’s Christmas season, usually the time of the year that all companies including Sony sell the most products. This is the first loss that Sony has reported since 1995 when they produced several box-office flops. In lieu of the situation, Sony is reportedly cutting 8,000 jobs and going to shut down five or six of the 57 worldwide factories. Will the headless chicken that is the economy ever recover?
Finally, Sony’s arrogance has caught up with them.
The whole markets arrogance is catching up, and not many are going to survive it. Its their own damn fault for ignoring the last year and a half, they should have leaned out at the start of this mess instead of waiting until the bleeding cant be stopped. Sony will survive because of its shear size, but only with changes, its just sad so many people have to lose their jobs because execs care more about their shareholders than the employees that make the company exist.
Well without shareholders the company wouldn’t have the capital it needs to expand. It’s a two way thing.
Patience is the key… rapid expansion when you dont have a sustainable market to support it is financial suicide. These companies want huge profits every year, when paying off debts, and making sure your spot is going to be there will pay off in the long time. Make sure every hire you approve is absolutely necessary, internally audit every job for usefulness., You may employ less but you will employ longer. I understand shareholders are needed in certain circumstances, but they need to take smaller steps and let the concrete set, and make these people understand slow steady gains are safe in an unsafe market.
Ever heard of speculation?
Not everyone likes to wait for 20 years to make money. Actually, no one *wants* to wait. Most of us are forced by our own incertitude and fears to get a day job
And, lastly, have you ever heard of hind sight? It’s easy to predict things after they have happened
Edited 2009-02-03 09:25 UTC
Speculation is OK, as long as you know how much you can risk without tanking the company. You don’t have to wait 20 years to make money, the problem is people don’t like to wait 20 months, or even days. Most investors are idiots unfortunately, and want everything now, which pushes companies into dangerous situations they otherwise wouldn’t agree to. The stock market should encourage long term investments, not hit up whatever is hot and jump on to the next when you’ve bled it dry, this kind of attitude has made people alot of money… but not nearly as much as it has lost.
In my mind I often compare Apple to Sony, except that Sony’s unique products seem so gimmicky.
Atleast with Sony you often get what you pay for. Vendor lockin in both cases though.
It’s Sony’s own damn fault. A product like the PS3 – which should have been a bigger seller – was flawed from the very start. No lessons was learned/copied from the Xbox’s earlier introduction. No support for popular codecs. The ability to develop third-party applications (i.e. open) would have had a huge positve impact on sales. But no, as typical of Sony, the product was limited/restricted to the disappointment of many potential buyers.
The major losses were from TV sales. Please RTFA. This isn’t Slashdot.
May Sony’s agony be as painful as possible.
Why so much hate?
The reason is because Sony is one of the most arrogant companies that exists. The head of the game division when asked how can they sell the PS3 for so much when it was about to be released and he responded that they could sell rocks in a box for $600 if it was branded Sony. Ever since they got into producing movies and music they have become one of the worst companies in the world. The rootkit fiasco. The deliberate disabling of their hardware so u cant copy anything or get a degraded recording. The lobbying congress in an attempt to make recording from the radio illegal. It goes on and on. The suing of little kids and grandma for supposedly downloading music. The lobbying for taxing blank CD Media. The ripping off of artists. The lobbying for broadcast flag, The lobbying for the DMCA, BlueRay price hike when HD-DVD died, Sony is a horribly draconian company. I used to own nothing but Sony products and have been personally responsible for recommending and installing over $1,000,000 worth of Sony professional and consumer equipment for several companies and individuals. I no longer and will never recommend their products to anyone. The Sony rootkit fiasco was a huge mess for us.
Back when I did sys admin work I used to purchase Sony laptops for sales people. I could pick them up locally, and they were reasonably priced at the time.
Until I called them about a warranty repair on a laptop that was less than 6 months old. I was informed that they would not honor the warranty since I hadn’t filled out the buyer registration card.
It was the last time I had purchased ANYTHING with the Sony label on it. If it weren’t for a couple of movies I would have boycotted them entirely. I certainly do everything in my power to point folks to some other, less idiotic alternative for a product.
I’m having trouble grokking the math on this one. If you go from a profit to a loss, you can’t sensibly say the profit declined by X%. It’s just not mathematically possible to *do* that calculation. You can only say the profit declined by X% if it was, at least, a profit both times.
FTFA:
Sony Corp. said its net profit shriveled to 10.4 billion yen ($115.6 million) in the third quarter from 200.2 billion yen a year earlier.
Maybe that will help your calcs
The summary is weird. Profit is down for the third quarter compared to the third quarter last year. The loss is projected for the year in total. Those two aren’t mutually exclusive, though the way they are presented in the summary here doesn’t make that clear.
Sony products are very good (VAIO, monitors, DVB terminals, earphones, speakers, etc…). I’m sad for the employees too. Let’s hope the company recovers quickly.
Exactly, I guess people on these boards think of the PS3 when they think of Sony. While that may have been a bomb, Sony make other products many of which are very good an innovative. Their DSLR range is particularly impressive, especially when you consider that their offerings are all priced below similar cameras from Nikon and Canon.
It would be interesting to see what Sony does. I hope that they will continue making fantastic cameras.
Actually PS3 sales and XBox 360 sales where equal this year, with only the XBox 360’s price drop keeping it ‘in the race’.
http://www.gamezine.co.uk/news/ps3-and-360-sales-equal-in-2008-$126…
I guess that means the only console not to bomb was the Wii.
Couldn’t have happened to a better company. I hope they next get a rootkit(virus) that wipes out the remaining 5% profit so as to totally wipe them out, slime of a company they are.
Maybe they can make up for it by installing more craplets on their laptops!
Ive always found Sony to be like Microsoft, they have some solid products, some very clever people working at the company but the most stupid managers ive come across. I hope doesn’t go away anytime soon, just the crap they have amassed such as the idiot spouting rubbish about the PS3 and the rootkit crap.
most of the comments here and the vitriol directed at Sony are warranted. In the 90s Sony was awesome….even in the 80s…but now they are still awesome but it seems they are a bit diluted. They do have stupid managers who are incredibly arrogant and it seems that they do not like acknowledging their mistakes at all. Thats whats hurting the company.
That said I wish them the best in terms of recovering and hoping that they have learned from their lessons about rootkits, drm, and overpricing their stuff. I do love my PS3 and I do love my 55 inch XBR8 and my Sony receiver, and my PSP.
I like the analogy, and I am not even left wing
There’s no such thing as a free market in reality–at least not the theory liberal market capitalists want to sell to us.