12/04/2012 World Business Report

left by his deceased father. Those are the headlines. Now for

the latest financial news it is time for it World Business Report.

Sony prepares to axe thousands of jobs as it posted a record annual

loss. Google looks set to profit from

sales of online advertising and the android phone.

It's all eyes on Sony today because these CEO says that he is prepared

to take painful steps to revive the company. He will lay out his

revival strategy in more detail at a briefing in the next few hours.

The Sony veteran, known for his aggressive cost cutting, has

promised to get the struggling television business, which has lost

$10 billion in ten years, back on its feet in two years.

Sony has lost money in each of the past four years. It has been

hammered by weak demand for televisions and it hurt by a strong

currency and slowing consumer demand. It is not delivering what

the customer wants and is losing ground to increasing competition.

Sony has suffered, simply because it failed to deliver must-have

products. It is not alone. Once upon a time the Japanese TV

industry dominated the market. Now, Sony, Panasonic and Sharp have all

been cornered by innovative rivals such as Apple and Samsung.

There is also a performance gap with Sony's foreign rivals, he'd

been more pressure on its chief executive to turn around the

electronics giant -- he'd been more pressure. Apple more or less

reinvented the game with innovative designs. Design has become a

critical part of what consumers love. What Sony can do remains to

be seen. Sony's stocks have almost halved in the last year. The CEO

insists there will be no hesitation in scaling back or withdrawing from

businesses deemed uncompetitive. Let's get more on this story. A lot

of speculation about what exactly is going to be said in the next few

hours. Looking at the potential job losses, it is going to be

devastating news for an awful lot of people.

It has been reported here in Japan that one thing that will be axed is

a division in the chemical department of Sony. The scale of

this challenge is pretty huge. In the last financial year, they made

a record loss of $6.4 billion. What can he do to turn that around? One

potential possibility, thinking outside the Square, is that he

could do some kind of alliance with Panasonic and sharp. Perhaps with

the backing of the Japanese taxpayer. There is a precedent for

that, because in small-screen televisions... Sony has caught up

with Hitachi -- link up. Another thing he could do is to put more

flesh on the idea of networking. That is That is the future - are putting

together its games, telephones, televisions, making them all work

together. I think people will want to see more details about how that

will be done. It is not just Sony that has been

suffering - Panasonic and Sharp as well. It is very strong competition

from Apple and Samsung. That is a fundamental problem. One

analyst here has been quoted as saying that it is as bad as the

Japanese consumer electronics industry facing defeat. The problem

is that they have been out- innovated by Apple. They are all

about design. Someone else is making the products, where Japanese

companies are hugging their manufacturing tight. On the other

side they are being overtaken by the likes of Samsung. Because they

are not facing the very high Japanese yen, they can make things

more cheaply. That is the challenge that Sony and those other companies

face. Google is one of the world's most

important companies because it has been the main gateway to the

internet. That is changing with the switch to mobile devices. It is a

huge question for Google. It has suffered a worrying drop in

advertising revenue from the end of last year as a result of that move

to mobile. Their results, coming soon, will be closely watched.

Most of us used Google. Not many of for us, it seems, are using this -

Google+. It is the company's recently been to social networking.

Though it has attracted more than 100 million users since last summer,

it is still dwarfed by its more popular competitor. Facebook is my

life right now. I don't know. don't use Google+. I tried it once

but it is not user-friendly, not as friendly as Facebook. I have tried

it once. It's not popular. At least not for me, I don't know, where I

am from, everyone is, like, Facebook. Last year, users spend

more than seven hours a month on the site. Google+ users were there

for barely a few minutes. Google says it is early days and Google+

should be seen less as a rival to Facebook than as an added feature

alongside GE male. -- at their e- mail. At the end of last year,

advertising revenue to be hit as users spend less time on laptops

and personal computers, which generate a more expensive to

Abbottabad. I think there are a lot of challenges facing the company --

expensive type of advertising. The economics are quite different - I

think that is critically important for this company. On the other hand,

Google has done very well with android personal devices, which now

make up half of the world's smartphone market. It faces many

rivals - not just Facebook but others on and Apple as well, which

are all breaking new ground. -- but it appears on.

Competition from Tablet computers has squeezed demand for home

computers. Most of this rise was due to firms upgrading office

equipment. HP remains the biggest producer, but live nova has taken a

lot of market share to become the world's number two. -- Lenovo.

Household in comes our starting to rise again, and there is cautious

optimism in the manufacturing sector. There are warnings that

rising fuel costs are limiting spending and becoming a major

concern for most companies. Increasing fuel costs have pushed

Bangladesh to the point of crisis. On Wednesday the International

Monetary Fund agreed loans of nearly $1 billion. This will allow

millions of Bangladeshi people access to fuel.... Paying more for

imported goods also drained the country's foreign currency reserves,

making it harder for Bangladesh to pay its bills.

Another government in debt - Italy hopes to raise 5 billion euros to

we finance its March deficit today. It raised 11 billion on Wednesday

but much higher borrowing costs are expected this year. Investors fear

that Italy, Spain and other eurozone economies will not be able

to grow fast enough to repay their large debts.

Let's bring you up to date with what has been happening on the

Asian markets. It is a better story to tell you. Bearing in mind that

the Nikkei had slipped quite substantially - in fact, this year

- this month, I should say, it lost 6% of its value only halfway