TOKYO, January 30: Sony Corp scored a solid 46 per cent jump in its group profit in the three months to December thanks to the windfall of a weaker yen and solid sales of its cutting-edge PlayStation game console.The Japanese electronics giant said that the good news would continue throughout the full year to March, as it saw its annual group profit jumping over 50 per cent to a record high for the second consecutive year.
"The yen 's positive impact on our business was far stronger than we had imagined," a Sony spokesman told Reuters. "We also enjoyed good sales in every sector, ranging from entertainment to video game players to audiovisual products."
Sony's group net profit, calculated by US accounting rules, soared 46.4 per cent in the three-month period from the same period a year earlier to 110.38 billion yen ($883 million), a record for the quarter.
Of total group sales of 2.01 trillion yen for the third quarter, also a record, some 107 billion yen came from the yen's year-on-year declineagainst other major currencies, it said.
For the full year to March 31, 1998, Sony saw group net profit soaring to a record 210 billion yen, revising up its earlier estimate of 185 billion yen. This compared with an actual profit of 139.46 billion yen in 1996-97.
To mark the expected record profit for 1997-98 on both a group and parent-only basis, Sony will pay a special dividend of 10 yen per share in addition to an ordinary dividend of 50 yen.Sony used a dollar rate of 125 yen in making the latest earnings estimates, compared with 120 yen it used for the previous estimates in October. The US currency stood at 125.65 in late Asian trading on Thursday.
"In addition to the positive effect of the yen's fall, overseas sales expanded substantially due to favourable growth in the electronics business, particularly in the United States and Europe, as well as increased revenue from the entertainment business in each region," Sony said in a statement.
Sony, which owns Hollywood film-making unit Sony PicturesEntertainment and music unit Sony Music Entertainment, said its third-quarter group sales and operating revenue from the entertainment sector grew 17.8 per cent year-on-year.
Last calendar year, Sony Pictures Entertainment scored all-time industry records for US and worldwide box office sales thanks to blockbusters such as "Men in Black", "My Best Friend's Wedding" and "Air Force One".
Sony's 32-bit home game player PlayStation, MiniDisc systems and the "Wega" series of colour TV sets with flat cathode ray tubes also achieved strong sales in the third quarter, Sony said.
Masayoshi Morimoto, a Sony managing director, told reporters that worldwide shipments of PlayStation reached 28.2 million units by end-1997. The popular game machine accounted for 25 percent of Sony's group operating profits in the October-December period, he said.But Sony took a "conservative" approach in assessing the state of its business for the January-March quarter, and the firm's 1997-98 profit would be higher than its latestestimate if the business environment did not worsen.
Morimoto said the company estimated that group operating profits would be nearly zero for the quarter.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
