For the October-December quarter of fiscal 2012, Olympus recorded a net loss of 391 million  yen (US$4.3 M) against a 756 million  yen loss of the previous year. The balance sheet displayed improvement on a weaker yen, but sales continued to be weighed down by sliding sales of digital cameras. Operating profit dropped 22% to 6.57 billion yen (US$73 M), while revenue fell 26% … [Read more...]

Canon has stated that its net profit for the fourth quarter of 2012 fell fractionally from a year earlier, remaining at 61.2 billion yen (US$680 M), and also posted a 9.7% fall net profit for the full year to 224.6 billion yen (US$20.2 B). A forecast of 13.6% profit growth for 2013 to 255 billion yen was made because of the boost from the yen’s weakening. Canon posted sales … [Read more...]

Fujifilm Holdings Corp. said that its group operating profit will likely fall 2.6% on the year to 110 billion yen (US$1.222 billion), down 12% also from its previous forecast, on the total sales of 2.21 trillion yen (US$24.55 billion), almost similar to the previous forecast and the total sales in FY11. According  to the company, the overall demand for compact digital … [Read more...]

Panasonic Corp. says that it has developed  a technology to increase the sensitivity of image  sensors such as CCD  or CMOS by replacing the near-universal colour filter array with its newly-developed prism-like “Micro Color Splitters”to generate colour information. The new colour- splitter technology directs all the incoming light to the sensor, instead of allowing half of … [Read more...]

Sony Corp. announced that its first nine-month (April-December) results for fiscal 2012/13 rose 3.6% year-on-year to 5,067 billion yen (US$56.3  B) and profit in operation turned black to 82.95 billion yen (US$921.6 M) from previous loss of 65.86 billion  yen. The company posted a pre-tax profit of 58.5 billion yen, but net profit after tax remained in red-50.8 billion yen … [Read more...]