Forum - View topicNEWS: Sony's Credit Rated At "Junk" Status Due to Falling TV, PC Sales
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GATSU
Posts: 15324 |
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I'm surprised no one's concerned how Sony's problems will impact Aniplex.
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kakoishii
Posts: 741 |
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Not surprising. They likely lost a lot of money on the ps3 alone, despite how well the ps4 has sold for them thus far, if they were trying to sell the previous system for $600 only to be forced to sell it for half that ~2 years after its launch that says a lot. Also not surprising their PC and television sales are hurting. Sony always feels justified in pricing themselves up on their name alone, but why would someone want to spend a premium on a sony tv or a sony laptop, when samsung tvs are just as good quality wise, and the pc market is oversaturated with good quality laptops at a discount and without the forced drm?
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yuna49
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Aniplex probably makes a profit for Sony; the article notes that its other content-based divisions do. I wonder if Sony will ever leave the consumer electronics business. It probably still has a strong presence in professional equipment, but all the evidence points to Sony losing ground to competitors like Samsung and LG. Sony would probably benefit in the long run by selling off its consumer electronics division and concentrating on content. Whether its corporate culture and executive staff would ever accept such a fate is another question entirely. |
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doctordoom85
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Except the general rule is that consoles become cheaper to manufacture as years go on. Also, with over 80 million consoles sold, it's a reasonable bet they made up with it via software sales. |
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BL
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Or maybe they could start competing on price. Sony is a large employer it would be sad if they would have to lay off all those employees.
Exactly, other competitors in the consumer electronics market are offering products just as good, almost as good or better for less than Sony’s prices. I think we are in an era where name brand (with the exception of a few brands) does not really mean much anymore. People these days are more concern with price if the product is of decent quality and the price is right then that is what they buy. |
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walw6pK4Alo
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May also be due to people becoming accustomed to their current but possibly slightly older television sets, ones that do not need to be replaced with gimmicky 3D for "smart/web" shit. My 40" is from 2009 and I cannot possibly see a reason for change, aside from upgrade in size; I absolutely do not need 3D, 4k, or web connectivity to link to my smartphone or netflix. I just need a set that provides a decent image. |
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GrilledEelHamatsu
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Sony lost $10 billion dollars on PS3 and an additional $5 billion on budget shortfalls. PS4 doesn't hold enough value to make up for this loss especially since Sony will still take an Operating Loss from PS4 since it was paid for through loans and expenditures. On top of that, Sony is FAR the company they use to be during the 90s and 2000s. They NO longer have $40 billion in capital. They lost $30 billion in a 10 year period and are sinking into red in all of their core Electronic markets. Competitors like Samsung,LG,Toshiba are cleaning Sony's clock in TV,Electronics,PCs(I'm typing from a Toshiba brand Satellite Notebook powered with Core i3 Clarkdale which is ironic because 10 years back VAIO was pretty popular, not anymore) Sony fanboys think SCEI alone can save them. No it can't. And that PS4 is going to bring in "PS2-like dominance" no it won't. Sony is only a couple of years away from Chapter 9 bankruptcy. To those denying it, don't say I didn't warn you. |
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dtm42
Posts: 14084 Location: currently stalking my waifu |
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This news doesn't worry me, given how appallingly and epically useless the rating companies have been over the past decade. They've gotten so many things wrong that it is hard to take them seriously. Also, saying that a company is a bad investment and that its credit is of junk status is not the same as saying that it's doing poorly and about to collapse.
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GrilledEelHamatsu
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They CAN'T. It's their core market. Sony is not solely a game company. That would be like Nintendo discontinuing portables or SEGA abandoning Arcade machines. You can't have your core market fail and expect to be fine in your typical market. It doesn't work that way. Hirzai will drop Playstation before he ever lets Sony stop making Electronics. As for Aniplex. Sony owns stake in the company, but doesn't completely own them. Unlike TMS Entertainment which is completely owned by Kabushiki Kaisha SEGA and is 10% of SEGA's profit, Aniplex only represents a 2% share in Sony Pictures Entertainment. |
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Polycell
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That said, I don't think anybody's really denying Sony needs to reorganize, whether or not a visit to bankruptcy court is involved. That may well include separating SCEI from the "core" electronics business. |
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yuna49
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I was talking about traditional consumer electronic products like televisions, disc players, and audio components. Sony could stop making televisions and still make PS4's. Gaming is a very different industry from television sets because of the razor-and-blades profit model. Even there I suspect they make higher profits off their share of the game revenues than console sales. Gaming is never the first thing that comes to my mind when I think of Sony. As someone in my sixties, Sony's brand stood for quality consumer electronics and innovative products like the Walkman and Betamax. They've lost the innovative edge to companies like Apple, and the quality margin between Sony devices and their competitors has radically narrowed. My first HDTV was a 40" Sony Bravia. Late last year I purchased a 55" upgrade. It was an LG. |
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GrilledEelHamatsu
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Then your naive. You really have no idea how dire it is, do you?
They have too much debt in each of their divisions to do so. They cannot separate SCEI from Sony, it has existed as an entity of Sony Corporation,Inc since 1994. Sony would have to "sell off" a secondary division of their's to restructure their core markets. Sony also has serious EBT incurement and losses on ROE.http://quotes.morningstar.com/stock/snejf/s?t=SNEJF These problems cannot be solved immediately.
Wrong. If Sony stops selling TVs, they will NOT be able to continue selling and manufacturing Playstation. In fact, if Sony got rid of their electronics brand, the entire company would collapse and fold. You have no idea how it works, do you? Electronics make up 75% of Sony's market. They have ALWAYS been an Electronics manufacturer since their inception in 1937. SCEI makes up about 50% of their brand. Its called "Core Markets". SCEI is considered a "secondary market". Sony cannot survive on Playstation alone. The reason being is the tremendous amount of capital they've lost. You think they're going to walk away with $30 billion in red Scott free? Loss of capital means, you have to restructure. You have to thoroughly re-evaluate each division so that your entire company can recover and start profiting again on all sides. SCEI alone barely makes up for these losses and incuring debt. That's why you hear some Sony fans use the talking point :"The Japanese government will bail out Sony!" [ Do not double or triple post, or you can expect to see subsequent posts deleted ~Zalis ] |
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Mohawk52
 Posts: 8202 Location: England, UK |
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Well I know that Sony is bailing out of the Broadcast Support and Service industry with the closing of one of their major R&D facilities in Basingstoke, England. 'tis where 1080i was born. About 500 top skilled people out of work. It's sad really, as for 30 years, Sony Broadcast was the standard for just about all broadcast studios and facilities round the developed world with the best camera chains in the business.
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Echo_City
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Due to its sketchy business practices (root kits, feature removal, DRM, geohot...) I can't say that I'm too broken up about this news. Each time I try to play a blu-ray on something besides a PS3-always a tedious experience-I find myself angered at Sony for so obfuscating this process, an anger compounded if I'm trying to do so on PC as the only reason that bluray on PC is possible is because of Microsoft (bleh). On a different note, I'm surprised that anyone would have a major R&D facility in England. Isn't dodging England's high tax rate the only reason that Ireland has any business?  
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GeorgeC
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Being the best or a fanboy favorite is NOT enough when you're draining money like a fatal blood wound and the transfusions just aren't coming.
I don't necessarily think Sony will go the way of many American electronics manufacturers or videogame industry predecessors like Atari and Sega. They will definitely have to change and restructure in major ways to survive. Whether that makes a difference in the end, nobody knows at this point. I'm not crazy about most financial reports... In my life experience, they're about as accurate and reliable as daily horoscopes or news briefings coming straight from government. When they spin the news stories, that's when you know someone is covering up something big or blowing problems out of proportion. The latter is clearly not the case here but it's still a bit early to declare "Game Over" for Sony, too. Nintendo, for all its console issues with the Wii's, hasn't gone into red far as I know but that company is notorious for being tight with its money and holding up console releases to keep tech production costs down. They've NEVER been in the habit of putting themselves out on a ledge by developing $900 hardware and selling it at a huge loss! Nintendo may not be the hardcore game fanatic's console provider of choice anymore but they haven't bled billions of dollars on the videogame industry wars like Sony and MS have the past two previous console cycles. I don't think Sony has made any profit since the pre-PS3 PS2 days and it's likely MS hasn't made a dime or much of anything off the XBox consoles with all their documented faulty hardware issues (360 has by far the worst reliability record I've seen for ANY major home console sold in history to date) and outrageous campaign spending, too. This business of developing $700-$1000 hardware and selling it at a loss can't continue forever... (You would think everybody would have caught onto to that fact after the spectacular failure of the 3DO and the niche-only market that existed for the equally expensive-in-its-day Neo Geo home console, too.) I don't know that MS has the ability to keep doing that, either. Their last several operating systems since Windows XP haven't blazed spectacular sales -- Windows Vista in particular was a huge bomb for them -- and we're headed down a path to who knows what computers will be like in 10 years let alone what OS they'll be using. (Hint: it still won't be a Mac OS but very likely will NOT be as beholden to Windows anymore, either...) Excepting groups of fanboys, I've never had the perception that the MS product is appreciated much overseas, either. (I'm biased towards more convenient, less buggy product anyway so I'll never be a huge MS-lover, period... I'm no described fanboy of ANY of these companies but I appreciate MS the least of the three by far.) The game industry itself certainly didn't need Atari or Sega to keep on going. A shuffle out of another company or two from the console hardware business is not out of the question... Many people are presuming it will be Nintendo and I've been guilty of that assertion on more than one occasion, too. I don't expect spectacular Wii U sales but Nintendo will certainly not knock itself out of an industry it partially helped revive in the late 1980s by being as (predictably) stupid and economically suicidal as its competition has been for a decade, either. |
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