RSSPanasonic's losses quadruple Sony's: down $4.68 billion
By Tim Conneally | Published May 15, 2009, 3:13 PM
This week, major Japanese consumer electronics companies posted their fiscal 2009 revenues, and provided an outlook into the coming year. To say earnings have been disheartening would be a multi-million dollar understatement.
Because of a harsh currency exchange and declining sales, Sony registered a loss of around one billion dollars, NEC's net loss was upwards of $3 billion, Hitachi lost a staggering $8.03 billion, and Sanyo -- which is in the process of merging with Panasonic -- reported a net loss of $970 million.
Today, Panasonic attributed its annual net loss (PDF available here) to the global financial crisis, which it pointedly noted began in the United States. The company's sales declined between 10%-19%, the cost of crude oil and raw material was up, and restructuring expenses hit the company with a great unified force.
Panasonic's outlook for the coming year was delivered with gravitas: "The company currently expects to encounter severe conditions because two trends are developing simultaneously. One is the world recession and shrinking demand, and the other is the changes in market structure such as the expanding emerging markets and a demand shift to lower-priced products. Under these environments, the company will rebuild its management structure thoroughly, as well as make preparations for the next phase of development and growth simultaneously, aiming to be in a strong position when the market recovers."
Ouch. I don't own any Panasonic products ....... maybe that's why they are down 4+ billion.
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|Its a little ironic that those firms that where handing out or rather 'back-handing' millions of dollars to movie companies to ensure they won the HD media war are now those with the worst losses.
Blaming the economy sure is a nice way of explaining away where all that money went.
Toshiba have posted a massive loss too but after all they lost the HD media war where as Sony, Panasonic and the rest of the blu-Ray camp won.
With all those millions of blu-ray discs and players sold you would have thought that Sony, Panasonic and co. would have made millions of dollars in profits! (sarcasm implied)
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|If you are going to lose, lose big. Everyone expects companies to be losing money right now, so the boards and management don't get hammered when the do.
I'm sure they've all packed years worth of write downs and restructuring costs into these results. Whenever things recover, profits should be unusually high at a lot of these companies for a while.
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|Haha. You're nice and callous today.
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|It's a shame. Panasonic is a much better company than Sony.
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|Every bloody business problem / recession can be back tracked to the US. It's a bout time the rest of the world f**ked them off!
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|Wow I think I just pulled my eye rolling muscle...
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|Obama said everything will be good next month.. The people of the USA will go out and buy all there products again. If the people of the USA do not they might still have problems..
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|Stop restructuring every 10 seconds and you might save some bloody money.
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