outlawauron on 14 November 2012
| KillerMan said: These articles really paint grimmer picture of Sony than what reality shows. This post in GAF never gets enough of love: ''Sony are probably going to be fine. They are profitable and once their tax situation is normalised I don't see them having a problem. The reason they are fine is that in 2008 they slimmed down their Japanese operation by around 30,000 and their international operation by the same figure, they then went on to shed another 10,000 Japan based jobs after the Tsunami. In pure numbers, Sony now employ under half the number of Japanese employees than they did in 2007. Not only that but they also have a profitable finance and insurance division which brings in around $1bn per year, so if things got really desperate they could spin it off and cash in around $12bn to clear debt and invest. Right now they don't need to do that. Next, Sony are in fast growing areas of business, they were recently confirmed as the third largest smartphone player by shipments, overtaking Motorola, HTC, RIM and Nokia. They have also recently entered the highly profitable medical technology field with the world's second largest player, Olympus. Sony and Olympus have opened a joint venture in which Sony hold an option to buy from Olympus at any time of their choosing after 2015 at market price. Where Sony are weak, TVs, Laptops and tablets. Of these tablets are the most essential for Sony to break into, the Xperia Tablet S was very well received, but then they recalled it and it has hurt their reputation and sales, they should still go on to ship around 2m WW this year which is a good base to work from. The TV division lost just ¥10bn in the first half of the year, this is down from around ¥40bn, so Kaz has stemmed the major bleeding in the division, some analysts believe that if 2013/14 is not profitable for Sony in TVs they will exit the market. This move alone will cause a massive rise in their share price as the TV division is seen as the biggest money loser (around $9bn since 2004). If they can make it work with premium screens such as the 84" 4K (which has sold through it's first and second production shipments) and new technology such as CLED and OLED, then I they have a good shot at overhauling Samsung. On Laptops, it is difficult to say what Sony should do with the Vaio division, some say they should just turn it into a high end tablet brand for Windows 8 with professional oriented feature sets (12bit screens, Wacom pen input, ships with Photoshop or other professional creative software) or shitcan it altogether. I think eventually they will go for the former and produce high margin professional products and give up on being a volume player as there is no money in it for a company that pays 10x the going rate for manufacturing (Japan vs China manufacturing costs).'' |
Interesting post. Never read it before.
