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TOKYO Sony Corp <6758.T> has been approached by at least three investment banks offering to sell its battery business as the struggling Japanese group looks to offload non-core assets and focus on reviving its consumer electronics business, banking sources said. Selling the unit, which employs 2,700 people and had sales last year of $ 1.74 billion, would help Sony cut costs and generate cash as it restructures its operations, three people involved in the preliminary discussions told Reuters. The company, a byword for innovative gadgetry in the 1970s and 80s, has been battered by weak demand for its TVs in [...]

LOS ANGELES Japanese stocks opened higher Thursday, with banks helped by earnings results and a weaker yen lifting exporters, particularly in the auto space. The Nikkei Stock Average gained 0.5% to 8,703.95, with the Topix rising 0.6%. Shares in Japan’s top three banks climbed after having fallen ahead of their late Wednesday earnings reports. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. gained 0.6%, Mizuho Financial Group Inc. added 0.8%, while Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc. — the only of the three to report a rise in profit — gained 2%. The big three reported a collective $ 7.5 billion writedown for their [...]

TOKYO Sony Corp’s network strategy chief, Tim Schaaff, will quit next month after leading the Japanese company’s efforts to build a unified online content delivery platform to compete with Apple Inc for the past seven years. Schaaff, 52, would retire as of December 31, Sony said in a release. Andrew House, the head of its gaming division would assume responsibilities for its online network unit as a transitional step. Sony said Schaaff would remain as an external director at the Sony unit, but did not elaborate on his future plans. Former Sony CEO, Howard Stringer, headhunted Schaaff from Apple in [...]

TOKYO Struggling Japanese TV maker Sharp Corp warned it might not be able to survive on its own, as it almost doubled its full-year net loss forecast to $ 5.6 billion, and said it was considering alliances with other companies. “Our corporate group has booked massive second-quarter net and operating losses … and now see a serious negative operating cash flow. This raises serious doubts about (our ability) to continue as a going concern,” it said in a statement on Thursday. Bigger Japanese rival Sony Corp, which blazed a trail in the early 1980s with its Walkman portable music players, [...]

TOKYO Sony Corp is likely to say it returned to an operating profit for July-September after it sold a chemicals business, but investors still aren’t sure a consumer electronics revamp will deliver the profit growth the group seeks. Sony shares, valued at less than $ 12 billion, have dropped 16 percent since end-June and its 5-year credit default swaps – the cost of insuring against debt default – have jumped by almost 60 percent. The benchmark Nikkei average is down by less than 1 percent. The maker of Bravia TVs, Vaio laptops and PlayStation game consoles, battling weak demand and [...]

SINGAPORE Sony Corp CEO Kazuo Hirai has spent $ 1.8 billion in the past three months snapping up an assortment of businesses such as medical equipment and cloud gaming, leaving investors to worry he is blowing his firm’s waning finances on a muddled plan to revive the fading giant. Hirai, a Sony veteran of nearly three decades, took over the top spot in April pledging to reshape the once-stellar brand around the pillars of gaming, digital imaging and mobile devices. Since his promotion, the company’s stock market value has fallen by around $ 8 billion. After a decade of losing [...]

Consumer electronics giant Sony (SNE) agreed on Friday to buy a significant share in Olympus for $ 640 million, enhancing its portfolio of technologies for the medical field. The company’s will combine Olympus’s lens and optical technologies with Sony’s range of digital imaging technologies to better perform in the rapidly growing medical market. “As part of our strategic initiatives announced in April 2012, at Sony we are aggressively pursuing the growth of our medical business, with the aim of developing it into a key pillar of our overall business portfolio,” Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai said in a statement. The Tokyo-based [...]

SYDNEY Sony Corp. was downgraded to BBB from BBB+ by Standard & Poor’s on Wednesday. “In our view, the pace of recovery in earnings of Sony’s mainstay consumer electronics businesses will remain slow in fiscal 2012,” the credit firm said. It added that a strong recovery in these businesses is not likely until at least fiscal 2013. The outlook is negative, S&P said.

Sony Corp (SNE) on Tuesday said it won’t be drawn into price competition on tablet PCs amid a plethora of cheap models from other makers as it pursues Android rival Samsung Electronics with a new tablet out this month. Sony will begin U.S. sales of its latest tablet, now under its mobile Xperia brand, on September 7. The 16 gigabyte version will sell for $ 399 — the same price charged by Samsung for its equivalent model with the same screen resolution. Apple Inc’s 16GB iPad 2 also retails for the same price, with its latest high resolution model starting [...]

Sony’s (SNE) all set to launch a follow-up to the company’s first tablet with what we have been told is the XPERIA S. The tablet’s unique design identity is carried through to the new tablet, though it’s much more refined and more subtle.  This content was originally published on While the tablet itself is rumored to feature a 9.4-inch display, quad-core Tegra 3 processor, and 1GB of RAM, the real story is about the accessories Sony is planning on introducing. We were able to get photos of a majority of them, and they range from Microsoft Surface-style keyboard cover, to [...]