Sony to cut plants and 8,000 jobs

Sony has announced plans to cut 8,000 electronics jobs - 5% of the division - as well as shutting 10% of its manufacturing sites.

The company said the jobs would be cut by April 2010 but did not say in which countries the staff would go.

Sony said it had been trying to reduce production because of the downturn but warned it still had to do more.

The news came as Japan said its economy had shrunk between July and September by much more than initially estimated.

The Cabinet Office said the economy had shrunk at an annual rate of 1.8% in the quarter, compared with its original estimate of 0.4%.

Investment cut

Sony aims to generate cost savings of about 100bn yen ($1.1bn; £730m) by the end of the next financial year.It will cut its investment in electronic operations by 30% and shut down about 10% of its 57 production facilities."The number sounds big, but this staff reduction won't be enough," said Katsuhiko Mori, a fund manager at Daiwa SB Investments.

"Sony doesn't have any core businesses that generate stable profits - the next thing we want to see is what is going to be the business that will drive the company."

[world/BBC News]

FYI: Blending a Charged iPhone Causes Explosions and more...

 
On Saturday at the Gizmodo Gallery, we blended a fully-functioning iPhone with a Blendtec, sacrificing it to the gods of copy and paste. What we learned was that if you blend an iPhone with its battery inside, it explodes. Whoops!Yeah, so we probably should have taken the battery out, but we wanted to show that it worked when we blended it (the iPhone was Blam's first generation model). Of course, I was the idiot chosen to do the blending, but luckily I was wearing a lab coat, which caught most of the battery acid milkshake. The same can't be said for Brian, who caught a lot of it on the face, but luckily none in his eyes.