Sony’s Fortunes Improve, From Rising Profit to a Return for Aibo

Sony’s Fortunes Improve, From Rising Profit to a Return for Aibo
Sony lost money for years on once-profitable products like televisions — which it could no longer make cheaply enough to keep up with plummeting prices — while failing to capitalize on the digital revolution
that turned Apple and its ecosystem of connected products into a global powerhouse.
Its entertainment arm is more financially volatile, but it has lately profited from hits like “Spider-Man: Homecoming.”
All of that added up to what Atul Goyal, an analyst at the securities firm Jefferies, called “blowout results” for Sony’s latest quarter.
Shares in the electronics and entertainment giant rose to their highest level in nearly a decade,
a day after Sony projected what would be its largest-ever annual operating profit.
With its Trinitron televisions and Walkman portable tape players, Sony grabbed
ahold of global consumers during Japan’s dizzying economic rise decades ago.
Other businesses, like the PlayStation video gaming line and an insurance company that Sony part-owns in Japan, have been steadily profitable.
A decade after discontinuing Aibo, Sony said on Wednesday
that it was bringing the mechanical canine back as an experiment in cuddly, consumer-friendly artificial intelligence.