Restructuring efforts fail to bring results to a still-ailing Sony as yet-- not with net losses for Q1 2012 reaching $312 million as operating profits decline by -77% Y-o-Y.
Total sales for the period reach $19.2 billion, a total one can at least partly credit to the folding of Sony Mobile (formerly Sony Ericsson) into the main Sony family.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Home Entertainment and Sound division sees losses reaching $126m due to (what else?) falling TV sales. Overall Sony TV sales are down by -35% Y-o-Y with losses reaching $84m, as the quarter also records low capacity utilisation of S-LCD panels.
The Playstation division also suffers from losses-- $45m, with sales falling by -14.5% Yo-Y due to the handheld PS Vita failing to offset falling PSP and PS3 sales. The imaging division fares better, with growing DSLR and high-end product sales bringing profits worth $160m.
The company claims it is "proceeding steadily with efforts to transform our business structure" as it continues to execute Kaz Hirai's "One Sony" stratey. Will it manage to reach profitability by 2013?
Wang believes the Surfaces will be "negative for the worldwide ecosystem" causing other vendors to "take a negative reaction." He nearly begs Microsoft to "...think it over... please think twice."
Proof of such interest comes through Kickstarter, which Oculus are using for crowd-sourced funding. Unlike most Kickstarter campaigns, Oculus only "sells" early developer kits through the service-- managing to get over $1 million (with around 3500 sponsors pledging $300 for a single dev kit) in less than a week.
"You could think about us building a reference system, and then basically licensing that reference design, have others build the hardware around it – either it’s a BlackBerry or it’s something else being built on the BlackBerry platform,” Heins says in an interview.
