"Will this ever end?"

Just when things were starting to look up for Sony chief Kaz Hirai, the sky has come crashing down again. The company has quadrupled the amount of cash that it expects to lose for the current financial year, this time blaming its smartphone business on the issue. It described the problem as “the impairment of goodwill in the mobile communications segment”.

This amounts to a whopping ¥180 billion ($1.6 billion), and will bring the firm’s expected loss up from ¥50 billion ($466 million) to ¥230 billion ($2.1 billion). That’s a staggering sum, considering that things were looking rosy not too many weeks ago. Of course, it now means that it will probably post an operating loss for the year, rather than the small profit that it had previously forecast.

The good news is that the PlayStation business is faring fine, but between poor selling televisions and now mobile phones, there’s always something else to drag its performance down. Analysts reckon that the fact that the Xperia line can only be purchased from T-Mobile in the United States is the part of the problem, as it’s the fourth largest carrier in the country.

To be honest, smartphones aren’t our strongest subject, but we were under the impression that the latest line of Sony cells are actually rather good. Of course, having followed this company closely for the past five or so years, we’ve come to realise that no matter how quality its products are, it’ll always find a way to mismanage them and lose money. In that sense, the PS4 is bucking the trend.

[source eurogamer.net]