Sony, the one-time titan of technology, today admitted its annual loss will be almost 230 billion yen (£1.3 billion) — five times more than its earlier prediction — after its once-popular mobile phones fell deeply out of favour.
The struggling Japanese firm, which has been through near-constant rounds of restructuring over the past five years, warned that it is wiping 180 billion yen off the value of its mobile division because of “a significant change in the market and competitive environment”.
Sony’s Xperia phones have suffered in the crucial US market, mostly because it has few tie-ups with carriers.
While the PlayStation 4 maker admitted this summer that it expected to fall to a loss of 50 billion yen for the year to April 2015, that is expected to be 230 billion yen because the mobile division is now worth so much less.
Today’s warning is the sixth in the troubled two-year tenure of chief executive Kazuo Hirai. The latest predicted loss would mean Sony will have lost 1.032 trillion yen in the past five years. Sony added that it will not pay a dividend.
When Hirai took the job in 2012, he promised to pull the troubled electronics division into the black by focusing on its mobile, gaming and camera divisions.
