wii life span and sales vs. competitors

[jalsonmi]

@Crazzyman:

As other have said, I like how I make a post about income and you respond with assets. All assets prove is that if both companies had to liquefy all of that stuff tomorrow Sony would be able to get more for its shareholders. As totalwar pointed out, having 13 nad a half billion dollars in property doesn't do shit for Sony's operating budget, and is subject to the visiscitudes of the different places the two compnies do business and the way they do that business. That is, Sony has property in Japan which had massive property values, as well as a studio in Los Angeles (movie lots take up a whole lot of space--in other words land value. Not to mention the high land value of Culver City in LA where Sony Picture Studios is located) and multiplexes throughout the US. Microsoft doesn't need to have any of those things to make software and the little hardware they make, so they primarily own office building complexes around the US. Thus because Sony is in the movie business (which is I'm sure they main reason their property holdings are so high) they have a much higher property asset than Microsoft. They are also much less likely to sell that property as it's imperative to they way they do business. Unless they feel like selling Sony Picture Entertainment as a whole, in which case their assets across the board go way down. You can make similar arguments down the line of the asset sheet, but the point is assets are not the issue, revenue and operating budget and cash on hand are.

In terms of your point about revenue, what does that matter, if Sony actually had a higher revenue than Microsoft? Yes, the income is lower, but that shows just how much of the revenue is tied up in their business model. It's fixed expense, such that they cannot use their revenue or assets as freely as Microsoft can. As Rath mentioned, Microsoft can afford to made a $40 billion ofer for Yahoo. Sony, meanwhile, can't afford to buy a television network, which severley limits the company as a force among media companies. They are sixth in the world in size for media companies, the five above Sony--Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Viacom and GE--all own television networks (two in the case of Viacom, as the CW is now a partnership between Viacom and Time Warner, merging the Viacom owned UPN and the Time Warner owned WB) and cable stations. This is something they'd like to fix, but cannot, because they operate at such a comparatively low income level. You may say that's part of the Japanese way of doing business, but I am sure they were prefer to have more cash on hand. I'm sure both Sony and Microsoft work the books (under GAAP) to show as little net income as possible in order to lighten the load of income tax, but if Sony had more real income it would be willing to offset the heightened taxes in favor of cash on hand.