By YURI KAGEYAMA
Tokyo - Sony's quarterly profit dropped 8.6 percent as a strong yen and falling TV prices erased the boost the Japanese electronics and entertainment company got from its hit movie “The Social Network.”
Tokyo-based Sony Corp. said on Thursday it earned 72.33 billion yen ($886.4 million) in profit for the October-December quarter, down from 79.17 billion yen the year before. Quarterly sales fell 1.4
percent to 2.206 trillion yen ($27 billion).
Sony in recent years has lost much of its luster - once symbolized in its Walkman portable music player that pioneered personal music on-the-go in the 1980s, catapulting the Japanese company into a household name around the world.
Nowadays it is struggling against flashier and more efficient rivals including Apple Inc. of the US with its iPhone, iPod and iPad machines, as well as South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co., from which Sony purchases liquid-crystal displays, a key component in flat-panel TVs.
Sony, which makes the Vaio personal computer and PlayStation 3
video game console, stuck to its forecast for a profit of 70
billion yen ($857.8 million) in the year through March 2011. That would mark a reversal from the red ink racked up a year earlier.
But Sony lowered its annual sales forecast to 7.2 trillion yen ($88.2 billion) from the 7.4 trillion yen ($90.7 billion) projected in October. That would be flat compared to the previous year ended March 2010.
Punishing its bottomline for the third quarter was the strong yen, which hurts Japanese exporters like Sony by pushing down the value of overseas earnings. The dollar now trades at about 83 yen, down from 89 yen a year ago.
Sony's flat-panel TV sales were up in unit numbers but lower prices hurt profits, Sony said.
On the positive side were strong sales of Blu-ray disc recorders and the box office performance of “The Social Network,” a David Fincher-directed film based on the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. - Sapa-AP