Nope, Sony’s Not “Recession-Proof”: Set for $1 Billion Loss?
by Peter Kafka
Posted on January 13, 2009 at 2:30 AM PT
No wonder Howard Stringer couldn’t promise he was “recession-proof” when the Sony CEO spoke at the Consumer Electronics Show last week: The company is set to record a $1.1 billion loss, according to the Japanese newspaper Nikkei.
That’s something Sony hasn’t seen since Hollywood producers Jon Peters and Peter Gruber managed to incinerate the company’s balance sheet in the mid-90s. Variety:
This contrasts with the $2.2 billion operating profit Sony predicted in October.
The Nikkei said the loss could balloon to $2 billion, depending on how successful Sony is in cutting inventory in the January-March quarter.
If the Nikkei forecast comes to pass, it will be Sony’s first loss in 14 years, when it took a one-time charge for its pictures division.
Black ink has turned red because of lower-than-expected sales of Sony’s flat-panel TVs and other products, primarily in the U.S. market, while the rapid strengthening of the yen has devastated the bottom lines of all Japanese export industries.”
Upside? Sony (SNE) still makes really cool stuff. Last year at All Things Digital, Stringer showed off a super-thin, super-expensive TV that used organic light-emitting diodes. Last week at CES, the company was showing off a different application for OLED: flexible screens.
Here’s a Sony rep telling you about the technology, but not doing a good job of showing it off:
And here’s video from Obsessable, which actually displays the goods:
Comments
Sony is making me crazy. While they have great technology and a great history, they have one crummy idea that they can’t seem to get out of their heads, even though they have personally seen the idea lead them astray for decades now. That idea is synergy.
Synergy is what led Sony to buy Columbia Pictures for $3.4b in 1989. Sony thought consumers who liked its hardware would like its “software”–the movies that Columbia produced. But customers with a Sony VCR didn’t even think to rent a Columbia film, and those who liked a Columbia film never thought to buy a Sony TV to watch it. Somehow, this surprised Sony. Sony wrote off the entire value of its Columbia purchase.
Fast forward to 2006, when Sony tried the idea again, with Sony Connect, a way for customers to download Sony music onto Sony electronic devices. Sony thought it could sell more music and more devices by linking them, but customers thought otherwise. They preferred this obscure device called the, um, oh yeah, the iPod. Maybe you’ve heard of it. For some reason, customers didn’t want to have to carry around a player for their Sony music, plus separate devices for music from other studios. Again, Sony was surprised.
Last summer, Sony tried again. It bought out Bertelsmann’s share of a music joint venture so Sony could have more control over how it will integrate music with its hardware. This, too, will prove to be a bad idea–and not just because Sony overpaid and increased its exposure to a deteriorating industry. I’m betting that Sony will be shocked and dismayed.
For good measure, Sony is running goofy TV ads that tell us that we should buy Sony TVs to watch sports because Sony equipment is used to film the events. Maybe they’re just counting on consumers to be stupid, in the time-honored tradition of advertising. Maybe Sony just wants to burnish its reputation as a technology leader, which is fine. But Sony better not be breathing its own exhaust here. Otherwise, Sony is making exactly the same mistake it made in the ’80s when it decided that it could sell VCRs by making movies.
In investigating 2,500 major failures over the past quarter century for a recently published book, a colleague and I found all sorts of interesting mistakes. We even found a few companies that made the same mistake more than once. But I’m not sure I could name a company other than Sony that has made the same mistake so doggedly.
Posted by paul carroll at January 13th, 2009 at 8:48 am