Business English Practice: Sony announces $3.2b biggest ever loss amid sickly sales & writeoffs

Click on the linked picture above to go to a newsy.com video about Sony Corp.'s newest and biggest $3.2 billion loss for the financial year. You can also find the written transcript together with the video at [ http://www.newsy.com/videos/sony-reports-3-2b-loss/ ].

In fact, the last time Sony made any money was in 2008, making a loss for the first time ever in 2009 after markets plunged in late 2008. And the last time total sales were this low was in the last century! (SEE Sony Group Financial Information Historical Data.)


SOME EXTRA BACKGROUND:

The man in charge since 2005 is Howard Stringer - a Welsh-American heading Japan's iconic technology company. After some 30 years at American network giant CBS - rising from journalist ultimately to president in 1988 - Stringer was hired by Sony in 1997 to be the President of Sony Corp. of America.

The 90's is well known as the "lost decade" for Japan's economy. Large foreign rescue investors brought in their foreign CEOs. Ford brought Henry Wallace into Mazda in 1995. In 1999, Renault famously brought in Carlos Ghosn who turned Nissan around. However, Howard Stringer was brought in and promoted by Sony itself - as its self-administered rejuvenating medicine - and not by a foreign investor.

After Howard Stringer came in as President of Sony Corp. of America in 1997, Sony Corp's group performance continued to stumble and Stringer's career, at the age of 55, continued to rise ever swiftly. In 1999 he was given a place at the international Sony Corp. as a director, and in 2003 was made Vice-Chairman. Ultimately in 2005 Stringer cemented his position as Chairman and CEO - despite being reported to have given up on learning the Japanese language (and still until today only spending half his time in Japan)! Later in 2009, Stringer further absorbed the position of President into his responsibilities.

The President, Chairman, CEO and white knight savior for Sony Corp., Sir Howard Stringer
and his... junior, shorter, executives

 Despite Stringer's late but stellar rise beyond his CBS-President career, Stringer has only had one year of outstanding results since taking over the helm in 2005 - that was in the 2007 financial year. Since then, as we know, Sony has fallen into a pit of ever widening losses.

With powerful and bright companies strongly competing against Sony in almost every product category - with the likes of Apple, Nintendo, Microsoft and Samsung - the future is a troubled one for Sony; even with their appointed skin-white-knight at its helm.





Some notes on the language:

The announcement of loss came as part of a regular report on accounting results. So let's take a look at some accounting vocabulary used:


net (sometimes spelled "nett") - "Sony suffered a $3.2 billion net loss" - In English, "net" has two main meanings.

The most common meaning of "net" is related to a web-like material - for example: used for catching fish. This is not the meaning here.

The opposite of the meaning of "net" used in the video is "gross". "Gross" is a larger whole total sum amount before considering any other amounts that you would like to deduct from this "gross" amount.

A "net" amount is the "gross" amount minus whatever deduction(s) you wish to deduct from that "gross". For example, your income minus your income tax can be called: "after tax income", "income after tax" or "income net of tax".

Much of modern accounting systems originates from Italy. The term used in Italian accounting, "netto", has the same meaning as the "net" in English. "Netto" originated from a Latin word that meant "cleaned, polished, shining" - so you can imagine a "net" amount as a "polished or cleaned" version of the "gross" amount!

We polish and clean off the layer of dirt from the crude or "gross" amount to give us the shining "net" amount.

writeoff - "... Sony wrote off years worth of tax credits. The writeoffs are due to lowered profit expectations..." - A "writeoff", or to "write off" is an accounting term meaning to reduce the value of something, especially of an asset, often meaning to reduce the value to zero. The term comes from the physical act of writing amendments in accounts to take values off the accounts. In English, the term "writeoff" has been extended from accounting to assets such as real estate or vehicles (even if no accounting is involved) which have been destroyed such as to have almost zero value - the destroyed property can be termed "writeoffs".

To reduce the book value of an accounting item, usually assets, and often reduced to zero value: "writeoff"

in the black - "Sony still expects the coming year to keep them in the black, despite the rash of bad news." - In accounting, the opposite of "in the black" is "in the red". In previous times (and perhaps still kept by some) red ink and black ink were used in accounting to write negative values and positive values respectively. Thus, in the Profit & Loss Account, a balance written in black would indicate a profit, and a balance written in red would indicate a loss. Another English idiom related to this is "red ink" to mean financial losses; for example, this headline from the New York Times: Insurer of Pensions Sees Flood of Red Ink.

In traditional accounting, a loss balance in the Profit & Loss A/c would be written in red ink. In this cartoon by Bill Day , from the political humor blog BartCop.com, presidential candidates McCain and Obama ponder the huge pool of American "red ink" that is the large national budget deficit left by outgoing President Bush.

Practice your business English by watching and listening to the video above. For more detailed study, you can read the written transcript at the link given above.

Don't be scared if there is a lot that you don't understand. As long as you learn a little something new, then that is valuable: learning bit by bit is natural learning. By watching and listening, you will also be more exposed to, and more familiar with, various sentence structures and other language techniques used by English speakers.

I'll be happy to receive QUESTIONS and COMMENTS from English learners, and I'll try to answer your queries here about the language in this video. I look forward to your comments!

[A rare opportunity for you to speak, practice, chat and learn English especially for business, finance, law, international economies & trade at the webpage for Mastery English by clicking on the Advisor button below.]

Business English Practice: New Car from Jaguar Costs $1 Million Dollars - an Electric Hybrid!

Click on the linked picture above to go to a newsy.com video about the C-X75, a new luxury super sports car to be made by Jaguar and sold for over a million dollars each - a luxury sports car powered by a  hybrid electric engine. You can also find the written transcript together with the video at [ http://www.newsy.com/videos/jaguar-to-produce-1-million-hybrid-supercar ].

The C-X75 - from Jaguar, the luxury car maker now owned by India's largest conglomerate, Tata group - is an expensive car, with a price tag of over a million dollars each - but it LOOKS like it's worth every single dollar! Just checkout the photo slideshow below from "Jaguarcars" at flickr.com:


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

SOME EXTRA BACKGROUND:

Popular hybrid cars today are essentially gasoline powered cars that save on the amount of gasoline used by running on a special in-built electric motor when the special electric battery has enough charge.

The present top selling model of ALL cars in Japan, Toyota's Prius, is already a hybrid technology vehicle. The Prius is also the number one selling hybrid vehicle in the much larger U.S. market; however, the Prius, or any other hybrid vehcle for that matter, has yet to even enter the top 20 most popular models in th U.S., let alone challenge for the top position.

In this special project, Jaguar have called the famous British Williams Formula One motor racing team onboard, who will "provide their engineering expertise in areas including aerodynamics, carbon composite manufacture and hybrid technologies".

Jaguar itself had a Formula One Racing team under its own name from 2000 to 2004, during its ownership by the America's Ford Motor Company (1990-2008). Ford, sold Jaguar to Tata, India's largest business group, for $2.3 billion in June 2008 (making a loss, having originally purchased Jaguar for $2.5 billion way back in 1990), just prior to the great stockmarket panic later in that year. According to The Detroit News:

Ford bought Jaguar in 1989 for $2.5 billion -- far more than conventional wisdom held the brand was worth. It was widely viewed as a vanity purchase. Since then, Ford has invested about $10 billion in the brand, including a $1.2 billion bailout in 2005.

So not only did Ford sell Jaguar for a lower price than it was bought 18 years prior, they also added $10 billion in investments, $1.2 billion in a bailout; and what is more, Jaguar is thought to have made a loss for Ford every single year of its stewardship prior to 2007.

Even in the year that Ford first offered for Jaguar, a newspaper in 1989 showed:

Jaguar's future alone was dim if not nil... The company was losing money, building only 50,000 cars a year..."

In 1935, the Jaguar name first appeared on cars produced by in Coventry, England; although the company can trace its beginnings through the founder and long term Managing Director, Sir William Lyons, for more than ten years prior to that, in 1922. The company made a name for itself in sports cars.

In 1965, British Motor Corporation (BMC - which then held brands such as Austin, Morris and MG) bought a critical supplier to Jaguar, Pressed Steel, that fabricated bodyshells for Jaguar.

By now Lyons was nearing retirement, and did not have a viable succession plan within the company. His only son John had been killed in a car accident in 1955, and his other board members were of a similar age to himself. In addition, the bodyshells for Jaguar production were fabricated by Pressed Steel, a supplier critical to Jaguar Cars and now controlled by BMC.

From the BMC perspective, Jaguar Cars was attractive because it was a success in the US market, and was thereby hugely profitable at a time when BMC lacked the funds to invest sufficiently in modern production facilities or new models. [source jaguar-enthusiasts.org.uk]

So in 1966, Jaguar was merged into BMC to become British Motor Holdings (BMH). But Britain's motor industry had already begun its long decline from the late 1950s. According to Wikipedia, the group that Jaguar belonged to, BMH, was struggling and the Government had to broker a merger just two years later in 1968, with another British motor giant, Leyland Motors, to form British Leyland Motor Corporation (BLMC). At this stage, BLMC was the last remaining major car manufacturer in Britain that was still in British hands. However, that mega-merger was not enough to make things better. Things got so bad that BLMC had later to be nationalized by the Government in 1975, changing its name slightly to British Leyland. The British group to which Jaguar was a member, "at one time held some 40 per cent of the British car market" and at one later stage shrunk to as little as 16%, according to CNN.

The Conservative powerhouse, and the first and only female Prime Minister of the U.K., Margaret Thatcher, came into power in 1979. In a series of large scale privatizations beginning in 1981, Jaguar was separated from its group and floated on the stockmarket in 1984, leading to its subsequent takeover by Ford in 1990 and eventually Tata in 2008. Throughout the troubled period of over 40 years from the 1960s through to 2008, perhaps Jaguar had not seen a period as profitable as back before 1966 when Sir William Lyons was still leading the corporation.

The brand may have been losing money for close to half a century of its 70 year history, but their cars sure look like a million dollars!


Some notes on the language:

Here is some vocabulary from the video which you may not have heard of before:

"wowed" - "Wow" is an informal word, an exclamation to show amazement, wonder etc. Its main classification is as an interjection. It is sometimes, as here in this video, used as a verb: "to wow", to impress others such as to cause amazement, wonderment etc.: "super-car that wowed spectators".

"hook-up" - This phrase is used in the video as a noun, meaning a connection of one entity to another entity: "(t)he Jaguar-Williams hook-up"... just as objects can be physically hooked up one to the other with a hook and chain/string.

"out-green" - This seems to be a newly coined phrase. "Green" is a an adjective, noun and sometimes a verb, associated with ecological and environmentalist issues - maybe because environmentalists love green trees. "Out" is sometimes used as a prefix, meaning to exceed in, or do or be more of something to a greater degree, such as in the words "outlast", "outdo", "outbid", "outgrow", "outgun", "outhit", "outpunch", "outlive", "outrun", "outperform", "outsmart" and "outspend". Thus to "out-green" is to be "more green" than others: "competition among automakers to out-green each other".


Practice your business English by watching and listening to the video above. For more detailed study, you can read the written transcript at the link given above.

Don't be scared if there is a lot that you don't understand. As long as you learn a little something new, then that is valuable: learning bit by bit is natural learning. By watching and listening, you will also be more exposed to, and more familiar with, various sentence structures and other language techniques used by English speakers.

I'll be happy to receive questions and comments from English learners, and I'll try to answer your queries here about the language in this video. I look forward to your comments!

[A rare opportunity for you to speak, practice, chat and learn English especially for business, finance, law, international economies & trade at the webpage for Mastery English by clicking on the Advisor button below.]