By Yuri Kageyama, Business Writer
TOKYO (AP) --Sony Corp. reported Tuesday that its fiscal second quarter profit zoomed by 26-fold from the same period last year, boosted by the success of its image sensors, game products and the latest "Spider-Man" movie.
Tokyo-based Sony, which makes Bravia TVs, PlayStation 4 video-game consoles and Wyclef Jean recordings, recorded a July-September profit of 130.9 billion yen ($1.2 billion), up from 4.8 billion yen reported last year.
Quarterly sales rose 22 percent to 2.06 trillion yen ($18 billion).
The Japanese electronics and entertainment giant raised its full-year profit forecast to 380 billion yen ($3.4 billion), up by nearly 50 percent from its earlier forecast of 255 billion yen ($2.3 billion) profit.
That's a more than five-fold improvement from the 73 billion yen earned in the fiscal year that ended in March.
Sony has suffered in recent years as it fell behind rivals like Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea and Apple, which makes the iPhone, in flat-panel TVs and mobile phones.
A pioneer in mobile music with the creation of the Walkman portable cassette player in 1979, Sony has been reshaping its operations to catch up in new technologies like 4K TVs, digital cameras and game software for its successful PlayStation franchise.
In the last quarter, a weak yen compared to a year earlier worked to boost Sony's bottom line. A weak yen lifts the value of overseas earnings of Japanese exporters.
The absence of costs related to damages at its computer-chips and battery businesses from last year's earthquake in Kumamoto, southwestern Japan, also helped.
Sony said its results benefited from the strong worldwide box office performance of "Spider-Man: Homecoming" and the popularity of a game application for mobile devices called "Fate/Grand Order."
Sony's perennially strong performing financial services businesses, such as life insurance and online banking, also did well, it said.
California governor signs law to protect children from social media addiction
California will make it illegal for social media platforms to knowingly provide addictive feeds to children without parental consent beginning in 2027 under a new law Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Friday.
California follows New York state, which passed a law earlier this year allowing parents to block their kids from getting social media posts suggested by a platform's algorithm. Utah has passed laws in recent years aimed at limiting children's access to social media, but they have faced challenges in court.
The California law will take effect in a state home to some of the largest technology companies in the world. Similar proposals have failed to pass in recent years, but Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation law in 2022 barring online platforms from using users' personal information in ways that could harm children. It is part of a growing push in states across the country to try to address the impacts of social media on the well-being of children.
"Every parent knows the harm social media addiction can inflict on their children โ isolation from human contact, stress and anxiety, and endless hours wasted late into the night," Newsom said in a statement. "With this bill, California is helping protect children and teenagers from purposely designed features that feed these destructive habits."
The law bans platforms from sending notifications without permission from parents to minors between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m., and between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays from September through May, when children are typically in school. The legislation also makes platforms set children's accounts to private by default.
Opponents of the legislation say it could inadvertently prevent adults from accessing content if they cannot verify their... Read More