| KillerMan said: Pretty weird. To me it looks like that Sony is pretty much the only Japanese electronic company that is turning itself around. They saw that economy crash will continue for years and strong yen is more permanent condition and started to downsize and are actually coming back to profits this fiscal year after years of huge losses. At the same time Panasonic and Sharp are losing billions because they thought that this economy crash/strong yen would go away in couple of years. |
To say Sony is turning itself around isn't quite accurate just yet. They're trying to and seem to still in the exploratory period to figure out what they can actually do to return to proper profitability while not just tossing away the biggest losers of their divisions (TV, for example). The job cuts were a good start, but this is a deep hole that they're in and this reduction of credit rating is going to make that hole deeper now. The only reason they posted a profit this time around was because of the chemical business sale. However, they still ended up in a loss because of their interest and taxes. It might get better next quarter, but that's a 'wait and see' thing.
It's always good to know two things when you look at a quarterly statement:
Operating Income is the company's total earnings before interest and taxes come out of them.
Net Income is the company's total earnings after interest and taxes have been taken out of them.
Sony's Operating Income was $388m, but their Net Income was a loss of $198m. That generally means that taxes and interest cost them $586m. Until they can get a handle on that and figure out a way to handle their interest payments (aka, make enough money to start paying off their monstrous debt load), their going to be in the hole for a lot of coin.
