This happened in spite of the better smartphone and PlayStation 4 sales

May 15, 2014 08:01 GMT  ·  By

There are some world-class IT companies that aren't doing so well from a financial standpoint, like Acer and Sony. As it happens, the latter suffered some pretty hefty losses in the fiscal year 2013.

Sony has recently published its financial results for the 2013 fiscal year, as warranted by NASDAQ companies whose income goes over a certain threshold.

And since Sony is a publicly trading company, its finances are available for the whole world to see. Something that can be both good and bad.

In this case, it's been mostly bad for years. Had the company been making profit, its brand strength would have grown due to high public opinion.

Alas, Sony has been incurring losses instead, for quite some time, and FY 2013 was no different in this regard.

In fact, the company had to report a loss of ¥128.4 billion, which is the equivalent of $1.25 billion / €910 million.

Shrinking demand for disc-based media was one reason for the result, but not as high as the one caused by restructuring.

Sony gave up some divisions, and will soon sell its whole PC business too, to Industrial Partners, a company based in Japan.

This might mitigate matters somewhat, as will the 5,000 worldwide layoffs (not that employees have any reason to be happy about this).

Sony maintains that these losses are only temporary, and that its better smartphone and PlayStation 4 shipments will soon have nothing to offset, leading to profit once more.

It might not happen this year or the next, but maybe by March 2016, we'll see results. Sony itself expects the loss for fiscal year 2014 (ending in March 2015) to be of only $489 million / €355 million.

Then again, there's no telling how much time Sony will continue to reshuffle its operations and change its customer targets, so it may take even longer than the next two calendar years for things to be sorted out.

In case you’ve missed it, Sony said that it was giving up the PC segment back in February. It wasn't all that shocking really. It's not like the desktop and laptop industries are overflowing with its branded products. Lenovo is the one running rampant there.

At least we don't have to worry about Sony going bankrupt like Kodak. The Japanese company has always been backed by the country's government, more or less, and it's a big reason why Japan is considered the country of techies.