Sony sinks into quarterly loss, racks up hefty annual profit

TOKYO — Japanese entertainment and electronics company Sony Corp. has posted a loss in the January-March, quarter, dragged lower by its flagging mobile operations and unfavourable currency rates.

Sony reported Friday a fiscal fourth quarter loss of 16.8 billion yen ($154 million), a reversal from the 27.7 billion yen profit posted a year earlier.

Quarterly sales rose 3 per cent to 1.66 trillion yen ($15 billion).

Sony expects its profit for the fiscal year through March 2019 to stay flat at 480 billion yen ($4.4 billion). It logged a 490.8 billion yen ($4.5 billion) profit for the fiscal year through March 2018.

That marked a six-fold surge from 73.3 billion yen the year before, when the company absorbed big costs from its movie business and from an earthquake in southwestern Japan.