Another Year of Losses for Sony and No Sign of Reprieve

A Sony Corp. 4K Bravia liquid-crystal-display (LCD) television on at the company's headquarters in Tokyo on May 14Photograph by Kyoshi Ota/Bloomberg
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Sony today said it expects to lose ¥50 billion ($490 million) in the current fiscal year, which ends in March 2015. Even though the Japanese electronics and entertainment giant has been struggling for years, today’s announcement comes as a surprise, since a Bloomberg-compiled average of 19 analyst estimates had Sony making a profit of ¥57.1 billion.

The last time Sony surprised investors with a downbeat assessment of its prospects was on May 1, when it spoiled the holiday mood by announcing that its loss for the 2013-14 fiscal yearBloomberg Terminal would be ¥130 billion, worse than the ¥110 billion loss it had forecast a few months earlier and much worse than the ¥30 billion profit it had forecast a few months before that.