“Shares in Sony Corp slumped more than 7 percent to near 32-year lows, as investors doubted the Japanese consumer electronics giant has a strategy to fix its loss-making TV business and compete in the smartphone market against Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics,” Dominic Lau reports for Reuters. “The last time Sony shares were this low, in the summer of 1980, its first Walkman portable cassette player had just gone on sale in the United States. So far this year, Sony has seen more than $3 billion wiped off its market value.”
Lau reports, “‘(In the past) if you wanted a top quality TV you had to buy a Sharp, Panasonic or Sony. Those days are gone,’ Steve Durose, Senior Director and Head of Asia-Pacific at Fitch Ratings, told Reuters last month. ‘I didn’t see anything positive in there (Sony’s results),’ said a trader at a U.S. bank. ‘There’s really nothing in there that can justify buying the stock. You see the loss narrowing in the TV business. That’s fine, but I don’t see any future in the TV business, so it doesn’t matter what they do.'”
Goldman Sachs “said Sony’s forecast of 33 million smartphone shipments in the year to next March looked optimistic given that its supplier, Qualcomm, faced capacity constraints and the firm’s priority is to supply Apple, which could leave Sony without enough smartphone chips to meet its target,” Lau reports.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Oh, we see a future in the TV business. Just not for Sony.
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Sony really is the anti-Apple. Once in a top spot of cool electronics and gadgetry (and quality), they’ve let everything slide. There’s absolutely no ease-of-use to their products whatsoever.
I don’t want them to disappear, but they surely need to get rid of management and start again.
http://taketotask.wordpress.com/2012/05/07/105/
Well said. They used to be the best. It can and usually does happen to some degree to all companies. Long before there was a Sony or Apple there was U S Steel, AT&T and General Motors. They were truly “the giants of industry” and look what happened to them. It can happen to any company. No matter who it is.
Sony are dead to me. They have been since that CD player I bought that would not play CDRs ON PURPOSE because they owned a record studio. F them, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass!
Backstabbing bastards also stole the original PowerBook designs (which they were manufacturing under contract to Apple) and joined M$ in actively trying to destroy Apple. Go to Hell Sony, more Steve revenge.
Apple needs to buy Sony.
Apple needs a better name generator than iAnything.
Sony’s multi patented name generator uses all the vowels, most of the consonants and every number from 0 to 10,000.
As bad as Samsung has been to Apple, by copying its iOS devices, they’ve been 10X worse towards Sony. They essentially copied Sony’s complete product line and undercut them on pricing.