Sir Howard Stringer, Sony’s CEO, was quoted by Reuters as saying “There hasn’t been that turning point that many had hoped for. We are waiting for a signal that hasn’t arrived.”
If Stringer is a canary in the coal mine of holiday electronics sales, it means that companies from Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) to Microsoft (NYSE:MSFT) and Nintendo to Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) may post worse-than-expected fourth quarter revenue. Analysts are guessing that American holiday retail sales will be flat to slightly down this year. High unemployment and tight credit could make those figures stunningly optimistic. Christmas numbers for 2009 could be as bad has they have been in decades.
Sony has done worse than many of its competitors over the last two years. It is still large enough and its product line is large enough that its predictions are a warning to a sector of the business world that has not begun to recover and may lag well behind much of the general economy.
Douglas A. McIntyre