Loss-saddled Sony to sell its Tokyo birthplace

March 4, 2014 Leave a comment

Updated: Friday February 28, 2014 MYT 5:32:46 PM

Loss-saddled Sony to sell its Tokyo birthplace

TOKYO: Sony will sell properties at a prestigious Tokyo site where it had its headquarters for six decades, as the once world-beating firm struggles to improve its bottom line, reports said Friday.

The company is looking for a buyer for buildings that once served as the control tower for its sprawling operations, the Nikkei daily said. It’s a move that stands as neat signifier for the diminished fortunes of the consumer electronic giant.

The properties are in the Gotenyama area near Shinagawa railway station, where land prices have been on the rise recently. The properties are expected to fetch around 15 billion yen (US$147mil), the economic paper said.

Jiji Press news agency the sale was intended to help make up for losses from Sony’s slumping electronics business, which includes television and personal computer operations.

Sony declined to comment on the reports.

Several hundred people from the group’s various operations currently work there. In 2007 Sony sold a portion of the site, moving its headquarters to the opposite side of Shinagawa station.

Sony started as Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo in 1946, the year after Japan’s defeat in World War II. The following year it moved from a different site in the capital to the Gotenyama area, where it grew into a global player built on its groundbreaking Walkman and popular televisions.

The Nikkei and Jiji said a museum archiving Sony’s epoch-making products would be one of its few remaining properties there. Sony this month warned it would book a US$1.08bil loss in the fiscal year to March as well as cut 5,000 jobs and exit the stagnant PC market.

The embattled company said in January last year it was selling its US headquarters in Manhattan for US$1.1bil. – AFP

 

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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