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Sony makes first loss in 14 years Publié le Jeudi 21 Mai 2009 à 22:51:35
Electronics giant Sony has reported its first annual loss in 14 years, after being hit by a big drop in sales.
Sony reported a loss of 98.9bn yen ($1.04bn; £685m) for the year to the end of March, compared with a profit of 369.4bn yen the previous year.
The company blamed the global downturn and the strong yen for the loss. Worldwide sales were down 12.9%.
It had previously announced it would be cutting 8,000 of its 185,000 workforce and closing 10% of its factories.
Exporters hit
Sony's president Ryoji Chubachi stepped down in April as part of a managerial shake-up at the group.
However, the loss was not as bad as Sony had expected. It had forecast a loss of 150bn yen back in January.
Sony's shares closed down 6.8% at 2,400 yen ahead of the results.
Several Japanese companies have said they have been hurt by the strong yen, which make exports more expensive.
On Tuesday, Hitachi announced an annual loss of 787.3bn yen - a record for a Japanese manufacturer. 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Even the new gets old - and that includes the Internet, says regular columnist Bill Thompson
"Sometimes on a Monday afternoon I find myself sitting a desk in a small room in a fairly nondescript office block near Cambridge railway station waiting for the network engineers at Bush House to call me up on an ISDN line so that I can take part in Digital Planet, the World Service technology programme I appear on most weeks.It's the same studio used by contributors to many other radio programmes.
Every time I hear that the 'Thought for the Day' on Radio 4's Today is coming from Cambridge I think of the yellow panels, the squeaky chair and the 1930's style microphone I know so well.
While I prefer to be in studio C21 so that I can sit opposite presenter Gareth Mitchell and watch producer Michelle Martin through the glass, it isn't always possible - this week my son has his first GCSE exams and I want to be around to comfort him after his RE and Maths papers, so I'll do the show down the line instead.
My role on the programme is to discuss the various interviews and reports that are featured each week and try to take the story onwards by putting them into a broader context or adding some perspective, so I get sent the packages in advance so I can do some research and reading around.
Until recently this involved Michelle making low-quality MP3s of the various items and emailing them to me and Gareth. I'd save the attachments into a folder on my laptop and listen to them as time allowed.
"The practices that emerged in the early days of the Internet and have grown up over the last quarter-century are no more guaranteed to survive than those that have developed elsewhere"Bill Thompson
Occasionally this would be on the train to London as I've got a 3G dongle so I can find out the background on the people interviewed or the projects we cover as I travelled.
But recently we've started using Dropbox instead of email, and I hate it.
Dropbox is one of many online storage services that let you share large files online and keep email traffic down. It works nicely, and it's more efficient than our previous way of working, but I really don't like it because I had established a nice, simple and inefficient way of working and now it has all changed.
Instead of looking through my e-mails for messages with attachments I have to remember to log on to an external site, which means I have to be online.
My dislike of the new system is absurd on so many levels it borders on hypocrisy.
I'm always online, so why should I find it objectionable that Dropbox requires it The large MP3s clog up my mailbox so I should be glad to get rid of them. And every couple of weeks I do a slot for Simon Morton's excellent 'This Way Up' on Radio New Zealand where we can't afford a quality connection so I record my side of the conversation and then upload the audio to one of my servers, just as Michelle does for me.
I should welcome the new system as a simpler, easier and more logical way of working, but instead I resent having to change my working practices to adapt to the new model.
BILL'S LINKSJohn Naughton Observer column
Will Davies on Kondratiev long wave theory
Steven Johnson on Old Growth Media
Bill Thompson: Journalism and Society
Of course our attitudes to change are not always rational, and it is sometimes hard to welcome new ways of working simply because adapting to change takes effort and requires more attention than we may wish to give.
But change is coming, whether we like it or not. In a recent posting on his blog my friend Will Davies, one of the few people I know who is capable of intelligently applying the work of social theorists, economists, politicians to the network world, is relevant here, talking about the work of Joseph Schumpeter.
He points out that the creative destruction described by Schumpeter is, of necessity, destructive. Old practices are abandoned, old companies die, and new ways of being, doing and making money emerge to replace them. This is not a weakness, not a failure, but an inherent property of industrial capitalism and those who complain about it simply do not understand the rules of the game they are playing.
John Naughton made a similar point in his Observer column this week when he noted that the future of journalism may well lie in the hands of companies other than today's giant corporations, however much that may annoy Rupert Murdoch.
What is sometimes hard to appreciate is this applies just as much to the 'old' world of established practice in new technology as it does to any area of human activity. The practices that emerged in the early days of the Internet and have grown up over the last quarter-century are no more guaranteed to survive than those that have developed elsewhere.
Last month Yahoo! announced that it was closing the Geocities web hosting service. Geocities was one of the earliest sites to let users create their own home pages and add their own content, and there was an outpouring of nostalgia at the news of of its closure, but its time had passed and nobody seriously suggested it should be retained.
My children rarely use email, relying instead on Facebook and instant messaging, and they probably think of me as slightly old-fashioned in my adherence to a thirty-year old technology.
Those of us who have been watched the network grow over the years need to make sure that we do not stand in the way of progress, that we do not act as if the way things were done in the old days of the internet should somehow be set in stone.
We need to remember that the wave of creativity that the network has unleashed is crashing over the digital world just as much as it changes things in the analogue one, and we should not expect to escape the revolution.
"Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital 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Science correspondent, BBC News
The beautifully preserved remains of a 47-million-year-old, lemur-like creature have been unveiled in the US.
The preservation is so good, it is possible to see the outline of its fur and even traces of its last meal.
The fossil, nicknamed Ida, is claimed to be a "missing link" between today's higher primates - monkeys, apes and humans - and more distant relatives.
But some independent experts, awaiting an opportunity to see the new fossil, are sceptical of the claim.
And they have been critical of the hype surrounding the presentation of Ida.
The fossil was launched amid great fanfare at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, by the city's mayor.
Although details of the fossil have only just been published in a scientific journal - PLoS One - there is already a TV documentary and book tie-in.
"She belongs to the group from which higher primates and human beings developed but my impression is she is not on the direct line"Dr Jens Franzen
Ida was discovered in the 1980s in a fossil treasure-trove called Messel Pit, near Darmstadt in Germany. For much of the intervening period, it has been in a private collection.
The investigation of the fossil's significance was led by Jorn Hurum of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway.
He said the fossil creature was "the closest thing we can get to a direct ancestor" and described the discovery as "a dream come true".
The female animal lived during an epoch in Earth history known as the Eocene, which was crucial for the development of early primates - and at first glance, Ida resembles a lemur.
But the creature lacks primitive features such as a so-called "toothcomb", a specialised feature in which the lower incisor and canine teeth are elongated, crowded together and projecting forward. She also lacks a special claw used for grooming.
The team concluded that she was not simply another lemur, but a new species. They have called her Darwinius masillae, to celebrate her place of origin and the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin.
Dr Jens Franzen, an expert on the Messel Pit and a member of the team, described Ida as "like the Eighth Wonder of the World", because of the extraordinary completeness of the skeleton.
It was information "palaeontologists can normally only dream of", he said.
In addition, Ida bears "a close resemblance to ourselves" he said, with nails instead of claws, a grasping hand and an opposable thumb - like humans and some other primates. But he said some aspects of the teeth indicate she is not a direct ancestor - more of an "aunt" than a "grandmother".
"She belongs to the group from which higher primates and human beings developed but my impression is she is not on the direct line."
Independent experts are keen to see the new fossil but somewhat sceptical of any claim that it could be "a missing link".
Dr Henry Gee, a senior editor at the journal Nature, said the term itself was misleading and that the scientific community would need to evaluate its significance.
"It's extremely nice to have a new find and it will be well-studied," he said. But he added that it was not likely to be in the same league as major discoveries such as "Flores man" or feathered dinosaurs.
Dr Chris Beard, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and author of The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey, said he was "awestruck" by the publicity machine surrounding the new fossil.
He argued that it could damage the popularisation of science if the creature was not all that it was hyped up to be.
Dr Beard has not yet seen scientific details of the find but said that it would be very nice to have a beautiful new fossil from the Eocene and that Ida would be "a welcome new addition" to the world of early primates.
But he added: "I would be absolutely dumbfounded if it turns out to be a potential ancestor to humans."
In the PLoS paper itself, the scientists do not actually claim the specimen represents a direct ancestor to us. But Dr Hurum believes that is exactly what Ida is.
He told BBC News that the key to proving this lay in the detail of the foot. The shape of a bone in the foot called the talus looks "almost anthropoid".
He said the team was now planning a 3D reconstruction of the foot which would prove this.
"We're not finished with this specimen yet," said Dr Hurum. "There will be plenty more papers coming out."
