Sony has continued to rebuild and reorganise itself after it announced an agreement to sell its chemical products businesses — which include Sony Chemical & Information Device Corporation (SCID) — to the Development Bank of Japan for an expected price of 58.0 billion yen, circa $730 million.
Many people may not even be aware that the Japanese electronics giant has chemical businesses (yes, more than one) but that will no longer be the case come the fall, when both sides anticipate that the deal will go through.
In between now and then, Sony will get its house in order. The firm will transfer SCID business units that develop non-chemical products, which include optical resin and magnetic device, to the main company and, likewise, all chemical related business lines within Sony will be transferred over to SCID.
The move is latest in a line of organisational changes that new president Kazuo Hirai is overseeing at the stalling company, which recorded a whopping $6.4 billion net loss (PDF) for the full year ended March 31, 2012.
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The biggest move saw Sony divorce itself out of Sony Ericsson, the mobile firm it ran with Swedish telecom company Ericsson, and, as a result, Sony Mobile Communications was born in February.
The company has also made plans to lay-off 10,000 staff and invest $926 million in restructuring.
Sony ended its LCD joint venture with Sharp last month, but not without recouping its full $125.79 million investment in the initiative. It moved on quickly and this week inked an agreement to work with Panasonic to develop new OLED panels, which will go into mass production next year.
The company says that is is “currently evaluating the impact” that the SCID transaction will have on its next set of annual financial results, which are not due until March next year.
Hirai and others will hope that next year’s financials are much improved, as the disasterous results of 2012 have cost the executives their bonuses, Bloomberg reports.
Image via Flickr / Jamiemc
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