Sony Revises Financial Outlook, Expects Disastrous Losses
posted Friday May 27, 2011 by Nicholas DiMeo
This is something that even the Welcome Back Program isn't going to fix. For Sony, this year has been simply awful. From the earthquake to the PlayStation Network outage, everything that could have gone wrong for them actually did go wrong.
After those events, obviously their bottom-line was going to be affected immensely, so this week Sony decided to inform its investors on just how bad of a financial mess they are in.
To see the damage, click the break.
The financial statement released this week (PDF) revised their outlooks to be completely realistic, regardless of how bad the situation has become. They're calling it a "consolidated results forecast." Before this report, Sony has estimated that they would be making $855 million USD in profit, but now that has been revised to a loss of $3.14 billion USD! Because of this, Sony is going to record over a $4 billion USD cash charge.
To date, the earthquake itself has put Sony in the hole for about $272 million USD, but this prediction has been made only up until March, so we expect that number to drastically increase.
Aside from that, we can't forget about the PSN outage. Sony has already estimated a loss of about $175 million USD and it's only been just over a month. However, that's not counting any upcoming lawsuits and things of that nature, so of course, that number's going to go up as well.
Unfortunately, this is Sony's third straight year of being in the red, which does not bode well for any company, but especially not one with a year like this. If the breach won't kill the company, the stock being sold off in the next week might. The good news is I've heard Bill Gates is willing to save yet another company from disaster. Maybe Sony will take the Apple route and design shiny products in the image of what people thought the future would look like 25 years ago.
