Sony to cut 16,000 jobs, scale back investment+

TOKYO, Dec. 9 Kyodo -
Sony Corp. said Tuesday it will cut about 16,000 jobs around the world by March
2010 as part of a major restructuring plan to combat deteriorating business
conditions amid the global economic slowdown.

The cut of 16,000 jobs will be roughly equally shouldered by regular and
temporary workforces worldwide.
The 8,000 regular jobs to be cut represent about 5 percent of the firm's total
workforce of 160,000 in the electronics division on a global basis at the end
of September.
Sony did not give a country breakdown for the job cuts.
Sony's latest restructuring decision shows that a recent series of job cuts by
Japanese companies suffering from deteriorating earnings has spread from
temporary employees to regular employees of major companies.
The Japanese electronics giant also plans to reduce the number of manufacturing
sites around the world by about 10 percent from the current total of 57 by
March 2010 in response to dwindling demand.
It will also cut investment for fiscal 2009 in the electronics division, which
the company says was hit hardest by the financial crisis among its businesses,
by 30 percent from the amount planned in a medium-term management program
released in June.
The measures will help Sony to trim costs by more than 100 billion yen a year
by March 31, 2010, the end of fiscal 2009, it said.
Sony Senior Vice President Naofumi Hara told reporters the company needs to
take the actions to cope with the ''unprecedented adverse circumstances'' that
Sony is currently facing amid deteriorating economic conditions.
''The U.S.-triggered financial crisis has had serious impacts on the real
economy not only in the United States, but also Europe, Japan and emerging
economies,'' Hara said. The economic slowdown was ''much worse'' than Sony had
expected, he said.
''The yen's sharp appreciation is also worsening the business environment of
our electronics operations, which chalk up more than 80 percent of sales from
overseas,'' he said.
To cope with the yen's surge against the euro, which has eaten into Sony's
overseas earnings, the firm plans to raise prices of some of its products in
Europe starting from January, Hara said.
The drastic restructuring plan was revealed as Sony expects its net profit for
the current business year ending March 2009 to plunge about 60 percent from the
previous year to 150 billion yen, due largely to currency fluctuations and
slumping demand for its consumer appliances such as flat-screen televisions.
The Tokyo-based company said it will postpone planned investment for output
expansion at its Nitra plant in Slovakia, one of Sony's sites assembling liquid
crystal display TVs for the European market.
It will also cut semiconductor-related investment planned for this fiscal year
by outsourcing a portion of its planned increase in the production of CMOS
image sensors for use in mobile phones to a third party.
Plants to be closed by next March include Sony Dax Technology Center in France,
which manufactures tapes and other recording media, Sony said.
The cost of the restructuring plan, including the job cuts and the plant
closures, will be disclosed in January when the company releases its
April-December earnings outcome, Sony said.
For the April-September first half of the current business year, Sony saw its
net profit plummet 60 percent from a year earlier to 55.79 billion yen.
==Kyodo