Sony Sells LCD Venture Stake to Samsung After Losses

Sony Sells LCD Venture Stake to Samsung After Losses

Dec. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Sony Corp. sold its stake in the venture with Samsung Electronics Co. to make liquid-crystal displays to the South Korean company after predicting an eighth consecutive year of losses from TVs amid sluggish demand.
Samsung will pay 1.08 trillion won ($935 million) in cash for Sony’s stake in S-LCD Corp., a venture formed in 2004, the Suwon, South Korea-based company said in a statement today. Sony, which invested 1.65 trillion won in the venture, will take a charge of about 66 billion yen ($846 million) in the quarter ending Dec. 31 after the deal, Japan’s biggest consumer- electronics exporter said in its statement.

The stake sale enables Sony Chief Executive Officer Howard Stringer, 69, to shed the responsibility of panel manufacturing amid losses in the TV business, where Samsung is the world’s biggest. To turn around Sony, which has forecast a fourth consecutive annual loss this year, Stringer has teamed up with partners to announce acquisitions worth a combined $8.4 billion in 2011. The purchases are designed to bolster the profitable phones and music divisions and introduced tablet computers to challenge Apple Inc.’s iPad.

“It’s a step forward for Sony,” said Shiro Mikoshiba, an analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc. in Tokyo. “Canceling out the venture enables Sony to become more flexible in procuring panels. Still, Sony continues to face falling prices and heavy fixed costs.”
Sony shares gained 1.6 percent to 1,394 yen at the close of trading in Tokyo today, while Samsung fell 0.2 percent to 1.07 million won. The deal was announced after the stock market closed for trading. The Nikkei reported the news earlier today.

They need to remove a few Zeros from their won so that the numbers are smaller.

They couldn't make a profit selling TVs, but they are going to make a profit competing against Apple in the tablet market?

they should stick to selling consoles and DVD/blue ray players

Hi there
anything SONY has done in the entertainment Industry has basically gone belly up -- usually because SONY has had the WORST Management of any large company on this planet currently operating.

-- Quite an achievement since there's plenty of really horrendously incompetant management around.

Take for example it's total fiasco with sticking to DRM music long after everybody else had essentially abandoned "DRM'ing" music anymore.

Ages before Steve Jobs had even THOUGHT of the Ipad Sony had the Minidisc -- still capable of storing music at far higher quality than even mp3 at 320 kbs, and could easily RECORD sound as well. Sony essentially Killed the device for personal users (still used professionally BTW) by making the device as hard as possible to get music in to or out of -- really cludgy software (Sonicstage) which had restrictions on how many times music could be transferred etc and used a system that SONY never opened up --- ATRAC --- excellent codec but what's the point if it's so riddled with restrictions nobody could use it.

Another example :

Now with high quality multi-media streams and fast internet Sony have also "Missed the boat" with Blu Ray. Why pay for a Blu Ray movie when you can LEGALLY download an HD one in a few minutes which will play on your large 60 inch LCD screen in full HD format. - Most cable companies now also have huge libraries of "On demand" films as well -- so again Sony is barking up the wrong tree.

I'd expect SONY not to exist in its present form for too long -- about the only decent piece of equipment they make these days are the VAIO laptops.

SONY is a great example of a once brilliant company rapidly going "down the tubes" fast.

Cheers
jimbo

Sony back in the seventies were good but as time has gone by they have spent to much time in crippling their products Panasonic does the same and Samsung has reaped the rewards of listening to what it is all about and that's the paying customer

What they both should be doing is looking in on the the top av forums and playing a part of what their customers wont and not keep turning a blind eye to those that have ongoing faults and continue to not listen in getting long term problems sorted out like in Panasonic case the Viera Cast

i don't just beta test software i have always played a part in the development of hifi/av as well for the past 40 years in the old days i was well respected by the Japanese in conferences and if i made a comment that something wasn't right they took my view seriously and got it fixed where as today they say were working on it and never do
That's the difference

jimbo45 said:

Hi there

Now with high quality multi-media streams and fast internet Sony have also "Missed the boat" with Blu Ray. Why pay for a Blu Ray movie when you can LEGALLY download an HD one in a few minutes which will play on your large 60 inch LCD screen in full HD format. - Most cable companies now also have huge libraries of "On demand" films as well -- so again Sony is barking up the wrong tree.

Cheers
jimbo

Click to expand...

while i agree with you for most part, i dont on this. Sony single handed won the Blu ray vs HD DVD war with the PS3, now more homes than not have a blu ray player thanks to Sony.

And as for the HD movie streaming, yes its a fantastic idea, but vast majority of us dont have internet capable to stream such things!

NICK ADSL UK said:

Sony back in the seventies were good but as time has gone by they have spent to much time in crippling their products

Click to expand...

This.

Not to mention their inexplicable need to not conform to spec, like with their audio connectors. After the 80s I avoided their stuff like the plague (coughwalkmancough), sure they had quality but in a pinch if you needed to swap something you were basically screwed since it was either Sony all the way or nothing.

Once Sony's engineering genius stepped down (and died) the company went down the tubes.

A lot of these problems were caused by the Entertainment division.
The engineering division wanted to release various digital recording products and the Entertainment division opposed them ("People will copy our stuff").

Sucking up to US corporate interests didn't help either ("your products must have Region Coding and DRM").

If you want a DVD (or Blu-ray) player that actually plays anything you stick in it, you have to buy a PC peripheral or a Chinese stand-alone player (it's been that way for at least 10 years here in Australia).