Mitigating the bad news that may emerge from Sony

Just last October, Sony gave guidance suggesting it could post a $1.5 billion profit for its entire fiscal year ending next March. But the Japanese business news service Nikkei said this morning that the company may actually now be preparing to post a $1.3 billion loss for the year.

Now, there's no official announcement, and no forms have been filed to that effect, although oftentimes news like this is "leaked" through business news services first to diffuse the effect of a bad shock. Sony had all day to refute the leak as rumor or innuendo, and hasn't done so.

We'll know who or what to blame when we see the final report, but that's not coming for another few months. The company's sales overall have actually not been declining by very much, and PlayStation 3 sales have reportedly been on the rise. Sony Ericsson has had some trouble, but not to this degree. So if all segments of this vast company are suffering equally, the likely culprit will be the very rapid devaluation of the Japanese yen -- a factor that is way beyond Sony's control at the moment. For every yen lost in the comparative value of the US dollar, hundreds of millions can be lost in export value. Early last year, Sony had been hoping to reap a $97 billion equivalent profit for this fiscal year.