索尼削减​​盈利预测

-Quite rightly, Sony isn’t the only one that we’ve seen that’s been impacted, but did the earthquake and the tsunami (did) take some toll on the company at least?

-It certainly affected a lot of companies here as far as a disaster, because it is not being helped by the disaster, the production supply problems here in Japan. But it is certainly, Manisha, a bad day in a lot of boardrooms across Tokyo, especially among the companies today that are reporting in the electronics industry. And if you compare Sony, who reported in the first quarter of the fiscal year, that being April to June, Sony certainly doesn’t look as bad as some of the other manufacturers. Sony, as you said, $191 million at a loss in the first quarter, Panasonic lost $390 million, Sharp $630 million, Nintendo $327million. And they are just symptomatic. You read through all of these different various reports, you see this repeated theme again and again. It’s not just the March 11th disaster, but it is also the currency, the world currency and that being the US dollar sinking—it is not helping these manufacturers who have to live in dire by the global currency, and that being the US dollar. Manufacturers in Japan, when they repatriate, are suffering under the strong yen and the US dollar and what we are seeing is major downward pressure on the US dollar and the reason for this downward pressure is all of this debate--the uncertainty out of what’s gonna happen in Washington DC. That, in effect, is translating not just to weak corporate profits, but also to an impact on the overall economy here in Japan. The governor of the region, where many of these manufacturers are based, said that he believes that it’s not just hurting the manufacturers, but that this is an urgent problem for the national government and for the national economy. Manisha.

-Yeah. And they seem to me to be caught in between a rock and hard place. You know, Remy was talking about exactly the same issue earlier, this pressure on the US dollar and how that we’ve seen, you know, the strengthening of the yen and how that’s just really bad for the big exporters, and not just electronics companies, it’s gonna be bad for car companies and many others as well. But a rock and hard place for electronics, because guess what, they’ve got big competition in this region in terms of manufacturing.

-Absolutely. And they’ve got to try to remain competitive and so the concern there then becomes–do you then try to push those companies out of Japan, do you try to make, to try to live in a dollar world by pushing production outside of this country, which then translates into fewer jobs here in the country. And so what we are seeing is companies like Nissan are urgently trying to make sure that its production hub will be elsewhere. And so Nissan is a little more insulated than Toyota, but at the end of the day, what that means are fewer jobs for Japanese workers.

take a (heavy) toll (on sb/sth)  to have a bad effect on sb/sth; to cause a lot of damage, deaths, suffering, etc