Sony Posts Losses but Remains Defiant News
Chris Leyton
27/04/2004
Sony profits fall during the last year but predicts better times lie ahead…
Sony Corp today posted a 23% fall in annual net profit, but remained defiant and predicted a strong year ahead based on strong demand for new Home Entertainment products.
For the past year, Sony posted a net profit of 88.5 billion yen against a 115.5 billion yen profit in 2002/03. Revenues rose however during the period by 0.3% to 7.5 trillion yen, whilst the Japanese electronics manufacturer predicted a 1% increase to 7.55 trillion yen for the forthcoming year.
A large degree of the losses stem from a three-year restructuring programme costing the Japanese firm a total of 355 billion yen, once again the Japanese firm will have to take another 130 billion yen in charges for the forthcoming year.
A break down of the annual fiscal report indicated that the electronics division notched up an operating loss of 35.3 billion yen against a profit of 41.4 billion yen in 2002/03, whilst profits at the game division slid by 40% to 67.6 billion yen as sales of the Playstation2 begin to dwindle.
In a separate announcement, Sony confirmed that it expects demand for the Playstation2 to slip by 30% in the full-year to March 31, 2005. Although the company met its predictions of 20 million units for 2003/04, it expects this figure to drop to 14 million units in the current year.
In addition, Sony confirmed that it plans to ship 3 million PSP units during the current year ending March 31 2005.