Sony Corp yesterday posted a six-month net profit of almost US$1 billion, crediting its PlayStation videogame unit and a weak yen for a big improvement in its finances as the company moves past years of losses.
The Tokyo-based electronics giant said net profit came in at ¥116.0 billion (US$960 million) in the first half of its fiscal year, reversing a ¥109.2 billion loss a year earlier.
Sony also reversed a year-earlier operating loss, although sales ticked down 0.3 percent to ¥3.7 trillion.
Photo: Bloomberg
The company has been emerging from a painful corporate restructuring that has included layoffs and asset sales, with executives focusing on its upbeat videogame unit and turning around a long-struggling television division.
The upbeat earnings come a day after Sony said it would acquire Toshiba Corp’s image sensor business.
The deal could boost Sony’s position as a global leader in image sensors, which are key components in smartphones and other mobile devices.
Shares of Sony yesterday finished up 0.9 percent, compared with the benchmark Nikkei 225 index’s 0.17 percent rise.
However, videogame giant Nintendo Co saw its shares close 8.97 percent lower after announcing its first phone app game — Miitomo — would not come out until March, after initially aiming for the end of this year.
The firm’s new president, Tatsumi Kimishima, said it needed more time to “boost the quality” of the game, which is seen as crucial to its future as it battles Sony and Microsoft Corp for market share in the games market.
Mobile gaming company DeNA Corp, which Nintendo developed the game with, plummeted 14.93 percent.
Nintendo bought a stake in Tokyo-based DeNA as part of a deal to develop smartphone games based on its host of popular characters, possibly including Super Mario and Donkey Kong.
The delay in releasing Miitomo will add to uncertainty that has swirled around the company since its chief executive Satoru Iwata, a leading figure in the videogame industry, died of cancer at the age of 55 in the summer.
Yesterday’s announcement comes a day after Nintendo announced a 20 percent drop in net profit in April-September, largely owing a big year-earlier gain.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts