I'm going to guess "negatively".

Say what you want about sony but they make a high quality product, there electronics divisions have always been the best I have 2 sony trinitron tube tvs one 10 years old one 5 years old they still look awesome and work great. Just got a sony bravia lcd and will be buying a sony surround sound system. I do not own a PS3 at this time but will admit the machine is well built (I will buy when the price comes down).

For sony to ever go under would be a dark day for me. I rely on them for quality products.

khuutra, about your sig, where it concerns the 360 and PS3....the gap between them is now more than 6 million, do you think the PS3 will really be able to reduce it to 3 million in only 1 year?...Or have you changed your mind due to the recent developments?

I will freely admit that my prediction is outdated at this point. I was simply working with the best info (read: I made a blind shot in the dark) that I had. The trends at the time suggested the gap would be closing for the next while, albeit slowly.

I probably also undershot the Wii.

Is it even possible to have a profit margin that low in economically strong years? That is not a sign of a well-run company. Smartly run businesses keep their profit margins as high as possible, only lowering them when a potential risk-to-rewards evaluation on a new product turns up an adequately low-to-high ratio that they can realistically invest in it and expect it to up profits. The only time you ever break from that strategy is when you want to introduce a phenomenally high-risk-high-reward item, in which case you need to look into a comprehensive risk-reduction strategy like Blue Ocean to ensure your product has a good chance of success.

From the looks of it, Sony is maintaining a lot of deadweight products that are driving their profits down. Either that, or their cost-to-price ratio is absurdly close to 1, in which case they really should consider either raising prices or (if the market won't take higher prices) scaling back the level of technology being put into their products. Whatever the case may be, Sony definitely needs the help of a few good economists, business strategists, and at least a few professional accountants too. Having that kind of horrible profit margin even in a time of economic strength is a very bad sign.

Total debt as 9-30-08 is 1,098,942.00 million yen ( lousely converted is around $10 billion )

http://finance.google.com/finance?fstype=bi&q=NYSE:SNE

So a possible explanation for their ridiculously low profit margins, then, is that they're paying off this huge debt with a large quantity of their revenue? How did they incur such insane debt in the first place, though? I mean damn, that's even worse business strategy than keeping low profit margins, the interest alone could sink a business if an economic downturn resulting in the lenders putting out a call for their capital back didn't do it first...

I know where about $4-5 billion of that debt came from.

To be fair, Sony has much more competition than Microsoft, and also than Nintendo (nowadays he he). There's a lot of competition in the electronics business (their main one), so it's not all their fault (although I'm sure they have a share of the blame, for example on the PS3).

I should check out the profit margins of other electronics companies some time.

Interesting, as if they didn't have enough problems... It seems Sony is like the guy who thinks things will keep on being good enough that they can maintain a huge debt. You know, the kind of people who tend to lose their homes and join homeless shelters and soup kitchens.

Many companies have a lot of debt, but those are precisely the companies which have the most risk from a downturn.