Sony Loses $10,000,000,000 in Eight Years

That’s billion with a B and that rhymes with D and that stands for doomed:

In its latest earnings report, the company announced Wednesday that it had sustained a net loss of $1.246 billion during the fiscal year ending March 31, 2014. Last fiscal year, Sony managed to profit $435 million, its first profit in years—it has missed profits in six of the last seven years.
In the same earnings report, the once-giant of Japanese electronics predicted a $491 million loss for the 2014-2015 fiscal year. Combined with its previous seven years of disappointing numbers, Sony has sustained nearly $10 billion in losses over that time.

Those losses come even after ditching its PC business and selling off some choice Tokyo real estate — and you can only sell off assets the one time.

There’s value locked up in the company in TV, movies, music, and PlayStation. Console gaming isn’t a big enough business to sustain the rest of the company, and the entertainment divisions haven’t done squat to protect Sony’s languishing consumer electronics products.

Want a bold idea? Sony should spin off its CE units (assuming they can get any money for them) and buy Nintendo for its IP.

Sony is pretty good at producing entertainment but pretty lousy at producing gadgets they can sell at a profit. Nintendo has a ton of valuable entertainment properties stuck on a weird console nobody wants to buy. Put them together and get them out of the CE business — except for PlayStation, of course — and you might have a viable company.