Sony revealed that it expects the annual loss for its financial year 2014 (which ends on March 31) to be smaller than expected by analysts and the revenue to be bigger. The buoys are the PlayStation and the image sensor divisions, while the Xperia smartphone business is still struggling. Smartphone sales in China are slowing down and Sony cut its forecast for the full-year sales from 41 million smartphones to 39.2 million. This means the company expects to sell just 8 million phones in the three months ending in March, that would make it the lowest quarter of the financial year (it went 9.4M - 9.9M - 11.9M). Despite smaller unit sales, the division will return a small profit of JPY 9.3 billion ($79 million), better than expected. Still, for the full 2014 Sony expects the mobile division to lose JPY 215 billion ($1.83 billion), up from JPY 204 billion ($1.74 billion) predicted in October. That's on an estimated revenue of JPY 1,320 billion ($11.3 billion). Sony had already cut 1,000 jobs but plans further cuts - 2,100 by March 2016. Kazuo Hirai, CEO of Sony, will announce a new business strategy on February 18, but has given no official details (some are already expecting the worst). The game division is expected to finish the quarter with JPY 1,380 billion ($11.8 billion) in revenue making JPY 40 billion in operating income ($340 million). The Devices division (maker of image sensors) will be the other big earner with JPY 100 billion ($852 million) in expected operating profit on JPY 950 billion ($8 billion) in revenue. The consolidated revenue for 2014 is JPY 8,000 billion ($68 billion) with a net loss of JPY 5 billion ($42 million). These are predicted numbers, Sony will delay the release of the actual numbers (including the results for the final quarter of the financial year) because of the hack of Sony Pictures. Source (PDF) |...
Source: http://www.gsmarena.com/sony_expects_smaller_loss_in_2014_mobile_division_slowing_down-news-11056.php
