索尼公司业绩高于预期

Sony, Kyung, I mean, in the recent years, it's always been an under performer. People always rolled their eyes and there's more problems hitting Sony. So are these numbers now the start of a turnaround? What do you think?

Perhaps, and that's what analysts are really looking at. They are looking at a couple of different boxes here. Let's first of all talk about the area of the red that you are talking about the net profit for the year which is actually a net loss, about 440 million dollars. That is a best improvement from the year before where it was almost double that. But if you look at the operating profits, something that the Japanese media here pays a lot of attention to, that's about 340 million in the black. So certainly there is better news on the horizon. And if you look at what their forecasting for the upcoming fiscal year, they are looking at making about 550 million dollars with a heavy push into the 3D TV area. So how did they do all of these? Well, they did it through something that you mentioned, Andrew, through cost-cutting as CEO, British born CEO Howard Stringer, came in in 2005 with the chart. He tried to turn around Sony to stop some of that eyeball rolling that you are talking about. So he wanted to have a big change for Sony, but he did have a culture clash with the Japanese operation. But then the economic downturn happened and the company really got behind these cuts. So what we saw were 16,000 approximately 16,000 announced job cuts, a number of factories that were idle. And so what we are starting to see, Andrew, are the balance sheets turning around at least in that area. The news is starting to get better for Sony Inc. This will be an interesting year for the company as they look at 3D TVs, Andrew.

Yeah, interesting. 3D really is a bit of game change at the moment, isn't it? But I mean it's not just Sony as we were saying, Kyung. I mean, looking at those numbers coming out from Toyota, given all its problems at Hitachi, Panasonic, etc. etc. Is there a bigger picture here? Is Japan Inc itself starting to see light at the end of the tunnel?

Oh, here is why we are paying so much attention to Sony because this is the very last of the biggies to make their earning's announcement. So when you look at all of the big marquee companies out of Japan, as far as a fiscal year they have all done better than the year before and now that's natural because the consumers started to come back. The economy overall is starting to improve. I'm gonna borrow something that Nissan CEO President Carlos Ghosn said. He said yesterday that there's still operating crisis mode, but certainly they are starting to look toward being on track to recovery. So that is something that's really shared across the board for all of Japan Inc.