Actually, there are quite a few steps left to go. BB is Junk  Status, but you can go well below Junk status as well. It just takes longer and longer to dig yourself out until eventually you hit C grade, which is basically a default. I believe Greece is sitting right around there.

As it stands, even WITH a turnaround, it will now take years for Sony to bounce back from this into higher credit standings.

I would be okay with this.

Some how I see Western or South Korean newer businesses are going to possibly have to take over Sony's aging company.

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.

It doesn't mean that Sony isn't talking, it just means they aren't hearing what they would like to hear.  However, when your back is against the wall, sometimes you don't concern yourself with hearing what you want to hear, but rather just hearing something positive. 

I mean does a person who is unemployed turn down a job for $40,000 / year even if someone normally in that position would make $50,000 or more per year?

The problem with so many people on VGChartz and pictures happens to be hotlinking, so many people see a picture and drop it here but it will not show up unless you first go to the root site, and then the picture, this prevents people from stealing the bandwidth of websites, many of you do it and do not even know you do it because you see the picture. Typically you can right click, open image (it will fail to load), go to the root site, and then back to the image. It will even show up here for a time.

There is no recovery. Your opinion is about 12 months out of date.

Sony has been permantly devalued in a long term sense. They are getting rid of over 10,000 of it's staff. The company is literally "smaller". It's like Sega quitting the hardware business back with the Dreamcast - That's it - The End. In terms of anything except a very long term investment. Which would be madness, shares aren't long term investments, from the offset, they become them if appropriate.

Don't become a financial adviser.

These threads do make me laugh though, financial investment and opinion from a person who is a fan of all things Sony is simply a recipe for hilarious comments.

Those rumours don't have any substance and I believe someone from Sony commented that it was not happening.

That analogy isn't very good. More like someone who owns a store, a really big store that shifts a lot of products. But ended up buying too much inventory in things people weren't buying much of, causing the store to have spent more money then it made. So while fixing that problem by reducing bad inventory a guy comes into the store and tries to buy it at a low cost because the store hasn't been making money recently. That store owner isn't going to sell his high revenue business at an undervalued price because of an inventory mistake he is currently fixing.

Reduce expenses to allow the revenue to generate profit, don't sell it at an all time low.

Things are actually getting better belive it or not.