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Sony Corp profits up, music doing well, for now
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 5 February 2010
Sony Corp have issued their third quarter results which show a profit for the first time in five quarters, so that’s nice.
The entertainment and electronics giants’ music division, so Sony Music and their half of the Sony/ATV publishing company, had a good quarter and in doing so contributed to the firm’s overall financial improvement. Strong sales generated by Susan Boyle, Michael Jackson and Alicia Keys all helped a lot in that regard, and “more than offset the continued decline in the physical music market”, the group says.
Sony’s overall operating profit for the period October to December was 146.1 billion yen (approx £1bn), compared to a loss of 17.96 billion yen (approx £128m) in the same quarter in 2008.
Despite that little lot of good news, and the undeniable continued success of the Cowell empire, in which Sony has a stake, of course (albeit a significantly lesser stake than before, following their new deal with the ‘X-Factor’ man last month), Sony Music does continue to quietly downsize its operations.
Some critics say that despite Sony having a stake in the biggest British TV phenomena of recent times (through Cowell’s Syco), and despite it having sister companies in movies, TV and gaming, it is behind its rivals in terms of readjusting to the era of 360 degree music deals.
Universal have successfully diversified out of the traditional music rights domain through acquisition, Warner are entering into interesting 360 degree business partnerships with new talent, and even EMI has enjoyed some success by reinventing its distribution business into EMI Music Services.
Sony has dabbled in such things but, outside Syco, some say such dabbling is simply not enough. With their stake in Planet Cowell cut and the Jackson legacy unlikely to be as big a generator this year as last, Sony arguably needs to develop some new more innovative projects to ensure recent good fortune continues.
