Sharp, Panasonic, Sony - Are Jap electronic giants dying?

[neddy]

• JVC and Kenwood merged (forming JVC Kenwood Holdings)
• Renesas Technology and NEC Electronics -the semiconductors arm of NEC- to merge forming Renesas Electronics.
• Panasonic acquired a voting stock majority of Sanyo
• Some of the bigger players resorted to merging some of their operations as Hitachi, Casio and NEC, and Fujitsu and Toshiba, did with their cellphone business.
• Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi signed a deal to merge their LCD businesses, creating a new company called Japan Display by spring 2012.

Olympus closing factories and cutting thousands of staff.


At least, Canon is still strong in cameras.


The uncomfortable truth about the decline of Japan’s tech giants

The immediate cause for the outstanding fall of Japanese tech companies is not the strong yen, as their executives insist, but bad product strategy, according to Richard Katz, an editorialist with the Wall Street Journal.

The big names of the Japanese electronics industry, with very few exceptions, will score a whooping $17 billion total loss in the current fiscal year, while rating agencies are reducing grades for companies like Sony and Sharp.

The mistake Japanese make is not adapting to the realities of the new century. As countries develop and markets mature, cheap capital and low prices cannot sustain growth anymore. The new strategy has to be production innovation and this can mean two things – to know which products to sell, as well as which not to sell, writes Katz.

Currently, 77 percent of Japan’s electronics production consists of parts and components used by other companies to make final products. But a simple analysis of cost structure for successful products like iPhone, iPad or Android smartphones shows that the largest part of the money does not go to parts suppliers. It goes to product inventors instead.

Japanese firms are competing against Samsung when they should be competing against Apple, Intel and Microsoft, companies who lead thanks to their innovative approach on the business, concludes the editorialist. “Just take a look at how many young Japanese flock to the Apple stores in Tokyo and how few linger in the Sony stores.

 

[Raiders]

Lots of electronics firms doing badly. Why ah?

My PRC gf working in Micron going to be retrenched soon. :(

 

[Ash007]

Good article, back in the 80s, 90s, there was a scare about the dominance of Japanese companies. That, cheap, fast,quality products is what everyone will buy. Its all a cycle, soon it will be China that will have the next Sony, Sharp, Toshiba.

 

[jubilee1919]

Sharp is now 100 years old and the warning is dire. They are about to fold. Only Sony is seeing some small profit and yes, the Koreans has overtaken the Japs and beat them at their own game. The Chinese has still some ways to go but improving due to their domestic market. It will take them a few more years to rival the Koreans.

 

[Cestbon]

Is a market force some will gain and some will lost.
Apple/Samsung/LG all are gaining market. Of course have to grab limited consumer(that human) to buy their product.
Just look at Samsung LED TV price is even cheaper than SONY/SHARP ..........and quality are the best in the market.
LG LCD is the cheaper killing all China brand/or some fake brand so called Japan name(AKIRA).

Same a car VW is killing all it competitor. Very soon will be 3rd largest auto factory. After GM and TOYOTA.

 

[GOD IS MY DOG]

Japanese Yen stronger.....................while Korean Won weakened..................between these 2 currencies.............


Japan has too many brands anyway.............


people now changed liao..................they're more ''brainwashed'' than ever so no more brand diversity liao.................

people just follow other people so buy same brand........................


same for other products also like cars.............number of brands not as many as in the past............

 

[Microsoft]

Recalled my colleague ask me which tv to buy 2 yrs ago...was quite surprise few wks ago when she say haven upgrade yet and may not be upgrading any time soon...reason being...everyone at home watch their own movies on individual mobile phone or tablet...wonder how much these had affected the sales of Japanese tv...

 

[jubilee1919]

Foxcom is giving Sharp Corpn. a much-needed lifeline. Hope they will survive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/business/global/sharp-to-sell-shares-to-hon-hai.html?_r=0

Foxconn Gets Japan Foothold With Stake in Sharp


By HIROKO TABUCHI
Published: March 27, 2012

TOKYO — In another sign of China’s manufacturing ascent as Japan struggles, the Taiwanese giant Foxconn Technology will become the largest shareholder in Sharp, a former exemplar of Japan’s electronics empire that has fallen on hard times.

Besides giving Sharp an injection of cash, the Foxconn deal, announced here Tuesday, will aim to help the Japanese company restore profitability to its TV manufacturing and liquid-crystal display businesses.

Sharp is a big maker of flat-panel television sets, and is still considered an innovator in liquid-crystal display, or LCD, technology. But the company is hemorrhaging money. And, like its compatriots Sony and Panasonic, Sharp has lost ground to more nimble South Korean companies like Samsung and LG.

Headquartered in Taiwan, Foxconn has become a world leader on the strength of its sprawling factory campuses on the Chinese mainland. It is primarily a contract manufacturer, with premier clients that include Apple for which it makes iPads and iPhones.

Foxconn, whose formal name is the Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, has repeatedly come under scrutiny for the labor practices that enable it to crank out products at high volume and low cost.

In response to reports of suicides at Foxconn’s plants and accusations that it forces employees to work grueling shifts under sometimes dangerous conditions, Apple has hired a nonprofit group, the Fair Labor Association, to investigate. The association, which is examining Apple’s various suppliers, is expected to release its report soon.

China, which long served Japanese industry primarily as a low-cost operating base for manufacturing, is now bringing its money and methods to Japan. Last year, a Chinese company bought the washing machine and refrigerator manufacturing business of Sanyo Electric.

Chinese manufacturers have recently agreed to build a plastics plant and a heavy machinery factory in western Japan. And in 2011, for the first time, the number of mergers and acquisitions by Chinese companies in Japan exceeded those by American businesses.

Even if Sharp does not fully adopt Foxconn’s methods after the investment, the Japanese company’s manufacturing model could benefit from streamlining.

Japanese manufacturers have long clung to a vertically integrated approach in which they try to make most of their products in-house. It is a business model that served companies like Sharp well in the 1980s and 1990s, but more recently has been overtaken by electronics companies that outsource most of their manufacturing.

Especially in high-cost Japan, vertical integration is strangling profitability, Sharp’s incoming president, Takashi Okuda, said Tuesday.

“Sharp can no longer handle everything on its own, from R.&D. to design, production, procurement, sales and services,” said Mr. Okuda. “In the competitive global market, Sharp’s vertically integrated model has reached its limit.”

Mr. Okuda, who previously led Sharp’s global business, is set to take the president’s job on April 1, replacing Mikio Katayama. Mr. Katayama was edged out and up to the chairman’s post after Sharp in January projected its highest net loss ever — 290 billion yen ($3.5 billion) for the year through March — hurt by a glut of LCD panels worldwide and a punishingly strong yen.

Tuesday’s deal calls for Hon Hai to take a stake of nearly 11 percent in Sharp.

Sharp will issue 66.5 billion yen, more than $800 million, in new shares to Hon Hai, and will also sell the Taiwanese company a nearly 47 percent stake in a flat-panel television factory in western Japan where the two companies plan to make TV sets together.

Mr. Okuda said Sharp would use the proceeds of the share issue to invest in new LCD technology, for which the company expects robust demand because of mobile devices. The two companies plan to jointly develop and produce a wide range of devices, including smartphones, Mr. Okuda said.

Sharp’s financial woes have been made worse by a 1 trillion yen bet on its state-of-the-art television factory in Sakai, near the western hub of Osaka, in 2009. But that investment weighed heavily on Sharp’s finances, as demand for large panels slumped and inventory piled up.

It remains unclear whether Sharp can rebuild a business to compete with the cheap capital and manufacturing muscle of South Korea’s Samsung, for instance, or the innovation of Silicon Valley companies like Apple. But a recognition that it must outsource, or even discontinue, cheap mass-market products could be a step toward improving profitability.

For Hon Hai, the deal with Sharp comes as further recognition of its dominance in global manufacturing.

“Sharp is one of the most recognized brands worldwide and is also the leader in R.&D.,” said Hon Hai’s chairman, Terry Gou, who addressed reporters in Tokyo in a video message. “Hon Hai — well, it’s not a brand, but has an excellent manufacturing record.”

“This is truly a winning alliance,” Mr. Gou said.

 

[yellowarse]

Japan is dying:

Declining Japan loses once-hopeful champions

By CHICO HARLAN
The Washington Post

<nomooter></nomooter>Jesper Koll, an economist who has lived in Japan for 26 years, says it's not easy for him to keep faith in a country that's shrinking, aging, stuck in protracted economic gloom and fast losing ground to China as the region's dominant power.

"I am the last Japan optimist," Koll said in a recent speech in Tokyo.

Indeed, the once-common species has been virtually wiped out. It was only two decades ago that Japan's boosters — mainly foreign diplomats and authors, economists and entrepreneurs — touted the nation as a global model for how to attain prosperity and power.

But the group has turned gradually into nonbelievers, with several of the last holdouts losing faith only recently, as the country has failed to carry out meaningful reforms after the March 2011 disasters.

The mass turnabout has helped launch an alternative — and increasingly accepted — school of thought about Japan: The country is not just in a prolonged slump but also in an inescapable decline.

There's frequent evidence for that in economic data, and in the country's destiny to become ever-smaller, doomed by demographics that will shrink the population from about 127 million today to 47 million in 2100, according to government data.

The current doom is a sharp reversal from several decades ago, when Japanese companies bought up Columbia Pictures and the Rockefeller Center, and Americans argued whether Japan was to be feared or envied.

Like a separate but related group, known as "Japan bashers," the optimists were bullish about Japan's future as an economic powerhouse. But unlike the bashers, who viewed Japan as a dangerous challenger to the United States, the optimists saw Japan as a benevolent superpower — rich but peaceful, with a diligence worth emulating.

Now, when Japan is discussed, it's instead for its unenviable fiscal problems — debt, rising social security costs, flagging trade with China because of an ongoing territorial dispute.

China, not Japan, is mentioned in U.S. presidential debates and described as the next threat to American supremacy. Japan's government has announced record quarterly trade deficits while some of its iconic companies — Sony and Sharp — have announced staggering losses.

By 2050, Japan "will be the oldest society ever known," with a median age of 52, according to the recent book "Megachange," published by the Economist magazine. Even over the next decade, Japan's aging population will drag down the gross domestic product by about 1 percent every year. That will further strain Japan's economy, which in 2010 lost its status as the world's second largest, a position now claimed by China.

"If you speak optimistically about Japan, nobody even believes it," Koll said. "They say, 'Oh, in 600 years there will be 480 Japanese people left. The Japanese are dying out and debt is piling up for future generations.' Japan is an easy whipping boy."

Japan optimism became a mainstream movement with the 1979 publication of "Japan As No. 1," an international best-seller that described the way a country the size of Montana had come to make cars as well as the Germans, watches as well as the Swiss and steel as well as the Americans — in more-efficient plants. Japan's people worked hard, its government guided the economy, and its streets were clean and crime-free.

"Japan has dealt more successfully with more of the basic problems of postindustrial society than any other country," wrote author Ezra Vogel, a sociologist at Harvard.

But Vogel, who has lived for several periods in Japan, and has traveled here at least once a year since 1958, says he, too, has become a pessimist. Most Japanesestill have a comfortable life, he says, but the political system is "an absolute mess," juggling prime ministers almost every year. The youngest generation, its expectations sapped by years of deflation, "doesn't have the excitement about doing things better."

Even the promise of lifetime employment and tight cooperation between government and corporations has backfired, leaving a bureaucracy-enforced status quo that makes it hard for established companies to reform and for smaller, more creative companies to emerge.

"What I did not foresee is that the slowdown would be such a challenge — that many of the things that worked so well on the way up . . . would be so difficult on the way down," Vogel said.

Vogel, still a professor emeritus at Harvard, says he has switched his focus in the past five years to China.

For more than a decade after Vogel's book was published, his predictions seemed prescient. Between 1980 and 1990, Japan's national wealth nearly tripled. Real estate prices in downtown Tokyo skyrocketed so high that analysts said the land under the Imperial Palace was worth more than the state of California. Japanese companies bought up American landmarks, and some policymakers feared Japan was challenging U.S. supremacy, particularly by using protectionist trade policies that blocked American products.

Vogel credited Japan's success in part to its willingness to study others. He described a nation obsessed with overseas travel: Students went to American universities, national sports coaches studied the training programs in other countries, trade ministry bureaucrats went on missions to Europe to hone policies. Japan even had programs in five foreign languages available on its national television networks.

But today, former Japan optimists see a disturbing trend. Fewer Japanese, they say, want to interact with the rest of the world, and undergraduate enrollment of Japanese students at U.S. universities has fallen more than 50 percent since 2000. The generation now entering Japan's job market is described by older workers here as risk-averse and unambitious, with security and comfort their top priorities.

"They have just given up trying to be No. 1" said Yoichi Funabashi, former editor-in-chief of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper and chairman of the Rebuild Japan Initiative. "People think you just cannot beat China, so don't even try. But that's bad, because if you don't train yourself on the international scene, you don't . . . sharpen your edge. And you become more inward-looking. There's a sense in Japan that we are unprepared to be a tough, competitive player in this global world."

Japan is famous among historians for its sudden transformations, re-engaging with the world in the mid-19th century after two centuries of isolation, later moving toward the militarism that helped launch World War II. After the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami disasters last year, Japanese hoped for another transformation, with the reconstruction of a tsunami-battered region prompting a broader political and economic overhaul.

But Japanese increasingly feel that has not happened, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. Just 39 percent now say that last year's calamity has made Japan a stronger country, compared with 58 percent in a similar survey taken right after the earthquake and tsunami. (According to the same survey, released in June, 93 percent of the Japanese public describe the current state of the economy as bad.)

Global sentiment has swung so far against Japan, the last few optimists now relish the chance to make a case on Japan's behalf.
Although Japan is commonly thought to be a "Detroit-like zone" with little chance for economic growth, former Sony Chief Executive Nobuyuki Idei said in an interview, the country still has a chance to prosper if it can tap into Asia's booming economies as a trade partner or investor. Tokyo-based venture capitalist Yoshito Hori said that Japan's many strengths are often overlooked, because Japanese prefer self-criticism to self-promotion.

"The value of Japan is, even when we do something good, we rarely say it," Hori said.

"When the Chinese achieve something, they say, 'We have done this.' " Japanese must learn to do the same, Hori said, "otherwise, we will lose our position globally."

That's partly why Koll, director of equity research for JP Morgan Securities Japan, decided this summer to give a TED talk — the common name for a series of pop-education speeches — in which he described his reasons for being the last optimist.

Japan has the world's most competent financial regulator, Koll said, and a per capita GDP several times that of China. Real estate prices are back down to 1981 levels — "wealth destruction has been tremendous," he said — but Japan has weathered this while still retaining its social cohesion and relative quality of life, with an unemployment rate of just 4.2 percent.

But Koll also admitted in his speech that being bullish on Japan is tantamount to saying Elvis is still alive.

"Things have changed," he said. "When I first got here, I had conversations with people who said, 'Oh, you're so lucky to speak Japanese, because we'll all be working for the Japanese soon.' You know, those are the things they're saying about China now."

 

[mojito]

Sharp is now 100 years old and the warning is dire. They are about to fold. Only Sony is seeing some small profit and yes, the Koreans has overtaken the Japs and beat them at their own game. The Chinese has still some ways to go but improving due to their domestic market. It will take them a few more years to rival the Koreans.

Cheaper better faster.
Cheaper better faster.
Cheaper better faster.

 

[johnny333]

I think it's the same problems that Spore is having. Except that the problems in Spore is worse.

Upper management gets lazy & fails to change & innovate. They only talk about innovation but don't do it because it is risky i.e. loss of $$

At least the Japanese are willing to bring in foreigners to try to change. Unlike in Spore where they only bring in foreigners who are cheap & don't create waves which threaten the status quo.

 

[Bigfuck]

I think it's the same problems that Spore is having. Except that the problems in Spore is worse.

Upper management gets lazy & fails to change & innovate. They only talk about innovation but don't do it because it is risky i.e. loss of $$

At least the Japanese are willing to bring in foreigners to try to change. Unlike in Spore where they only bring in foreigners who are cheap & don't create waves which threaten the status quo.

Just like PAP , too much dead wood. Upper management are stupid and talk only. They know nothing. They are paid for the responsibilities of the position not their personal ability. Technically you can put a dog or cat in the position.
Jap cannot change because of upper management crap. Wine Dine and fuck daily. Japanese foreign input are used to do unpopular and obvious things that a dog can oso do. Gaijins hired have no solution to help the company produce things the world wants.

 

[akunei]

NTUC selling this brand Sansui (i think its from China) of electronic products and i bought a set of hifi (with DVD, MP3 and IPHONE feature) at around $80 with warranty. Even though the quality may not be as good as branded ones, but it serves the basic purpose. No complaint so far.

 

[sukhoi-30]

Japanese Yen stronger.....................while Korean Won weakened..................between these 2 currencies.............


Japan has too many brands anyway.............


people now changed liao..................they're more ''brainwashed'' than ever so no more brand diversity liao.................

people just follow other people so buy same brand........................


same for other products also like cars.............number of brands not as many as in the past............

Yes, I tend to agreed with this view.

Many people just follow others and buy the same brand without much thought.

I was shopping around for a TV and a sound system few months back . And all the big stores I looked around, i was pestered by salesmans to buy a particular Korean brand , citing low prices as an attraction.
One old lady even ended up buying that brand even when it is more expensive than the Japanese brand she initially wanted to buy after the salesman sweet talk to her.

A friend who works in this line disclosed that the Japanese products are still a better one compared to the competitors but the marketing strength of their competitors is way above them.

Sometimes, the products with more marketing gets more sales and not necessary the best quality.

 

[Leongsam]

I love my PANASONIC heat pump.

 

[Huat-Ah]

I love Samsung products

While my Pet Kinana loves to EAT BANANA

 

[singveld]

Lots of electronics firms doing badly. Why ah?
My PRC gf working in Micron going to be retrenched soon. :(

due to strength of samsung microelectronic.

 

[yellowarse]

I love Samsung products

Samsung still lags behind in reliability. Two of my Samsung phones broke down - one within the warranty period, the other after a year and a half.

My LG DVD player broke down after only 6 months.

On the other hand, my China-made Lenovo laptop lasted 4 years, and is still going strong.

Korean products still have some way to go before matching the best in the world. It's more marketing hype than anything else.

 

[singveld]

Panasonic cleans house with writedowns, sees US$9.6bil loss

TOKYO: Panasonic Corp said it will lose almost US$10 billion this business year as it cleans house of poorly performing operations, writing down billions of dollars of goodwill and assets in its mobile and energy units while its new boss readies for a fresh bout of restructuring.

Shares in Panasonic, founded in 1918, plunged by nearly a fifth on Thursday to their lowest in more than three decades.

A day earlier, it forecast a 765 billion yen ($9.6 billion) net loss for the year to March, nearly matching last year's record loss of 772 billion yen. The result would boost its cumulative loss over five years to nearly $25 billion.

Kazuhiro Tsuga, who became Panasonic's president this year, has promised a harsh revamp, to be unveiled by next March, that is expected to beat a path away from money-losing TVs and other consumer electronics.

"It's unfortunate, but we are among the losers in consumer electronics," he told a news conference.

Panasonic's Japanese peers Sharp Corp and Sony Corp have also struggled with heavy losses in TVs and other mainstay electronics goods as more nimble, better-funded rivals - especially South Korea's Samsung Electronics Co - take over turf they once dominated.

Shares in Sharp and Sony, which report quarterly results after the market close on Thursday, also fell.

But Panasonic's multibillion-dollar write offs, including deferred tax assets, are a sign that Tsuga is already scaling back businesses that do not add to the bottom line as a weak global economy takes its toll.

"We believe we have removed everything that posed a writedown risk," Panasonic's Chief Financial Officer Hideaki Kawai said.

Even after a 36,000 reduction in its workforce last year, Panasonic remains Japan's largest corporate employer with 330,000 workers.

The maker of Viera TVs, which had been projecting 50 billion yen in net profit in the year to next March, also cut its annual operating profit target to 140 billion yen from 260 billion yen.

Its projection for annual TV sales was trimmed to 13 million sets from 15.5 million.

MORE CUTS

The size of this year's loss came as a shock to investors. Panasonic's move to suspend its dividend for the first time since 1950 also meant many pension funds could no longer hold the stock, said Chibagin Asset Management adviser Fujio Ando.

"It's going to be hard to see the stock recover unless we see the restructuring completed with Panasonic producing globally competitive products," he said.

Still, analysts praised Tsuga for his plan to overhaul a company long criticised as sprawling and resistant to change.

J.P. Morgan analyst Yoshiharu Izumi said Tsuga's "shock treatment" promised to transform the mammoth corporation into a nimbler set of small and mid-sized units responsible for producing at least a 5-percent operating margin.

"We read these latest writedowns as a message indicating a major shift in corporate mindset," he said in a note.

Since the start of the year, Panasonic's shares have dropped more than 35 percent, compared with a 5 percent gain in Tokyo's benchmark Nikkei 225 stock average. After falling by their 100 yen daily limit in early trade on Thursday, Panasonic steadied around 416 yen, down 98 yen or 19 percent.

Panasonic will write off 238 billion yen in goodwill related to its mobile phone unit and its businesses in solar panels and small lithium batteries, which are used in PCs and smartphones.

The company last year boosted output capacity of solar panels by half, to 900 megawatts, with a new plant in Malaysia, and has been planning to ramp up capacity to 1.5 gigawatts by March 2016. But with weak demand, particularly in Europe, the company said on Wednesday it is reconsidering that expansion.

Tsuga also said he would halt sales of smartphones in Europe after having just returned to the market this year.

Sony's response, in contrast, has been to double down on consumer electronics with a push into smartphones and tablets.

Panasonic's overall restructuring charges in the first half ballooned to 356 billion yen, and it expects such costs to reach 440 billion yen for the year compared with an earlier 41 billion yen estimate. The company also said it incurred a provision of 413 billion yen for income taxes.

"It's highly possible that Panasonic will cut its outlook again later," said Mitsushige Akino, chief fund manager at Ichiyoshi Investment. "It's very difficult for them to judge how much restructuring will cost at this point."

In the three months to September 30, Panasonic posted an operating profit of 48.8 billion yen compared with a profit of 42 billion yen a year ago. The result was lower than the average 55.6 billion yen profit estimated by five analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

As the company prepares to rejig its business portfolio, Panasonic this month secured $7.6 billion of loan commitments from Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and other banks, which will allow it to sidestep fund-raising in the credit markets.

Moody's Investors Service in September cut its rating on Panasonic two notches to Baa1, citing a low level of profitability and elevated leverage

 

[singveld]

TOKYO — After years of bets gone wrong and lost opportunities, three of Japan’s consumer electronics giants are showing some signs of faltering.

In the most dire warning, Sharp forecast on Thursday a 450 billion yen ($5.6 billion) full-year loss and warned that it had “material doubts” about its ability to survive.

On the same day, Panasonic’s shares lost a fifth of their value in Tokyo after the company forecast a 765 billion yen ($9.6 billion) annual net loss from write-downs in its solar-power, battery and mobile handset businesses.

And Sony, perhaps the best positioned of the companies, posted a net loss of 15.5 billion yen ($194 million) for the quarter on Thursday and warned of falling sales in almost every product it sells.

“We have a lot of great technology which we want to tap to revive and generate profit, but the company does not have that vitality,” Takashi Okuda, Sharp’s chief executive, told reporters after the company posted a net loss of 249 billion yen ($3.1 billion) for the three months to September. The loss was far larger than expected.

In a statement, the company said it had a “serious negative operating cash flow” which raised “serious doubts” about its ability to continue as a going concern, and said it was taking steps, including pay cuts, voluntary redundancies and asset sales, to generate cash flow.

While Sharp is in the most serious trouble, the three companies’ woes are similar at the core.

All three make good quality, even cutting-edge products — but so do their overseas competitors, usually at lower prices. None of the three have managed to generate the brand pizazz of Apple, or the marketing muscle of Samsung Electronics. In addition, a stubbornly strong yen continues to sap their competitiveness, while Japan’s territorial dispute with China has hurt sales there.

The scale of the losses is the result of specific missteps, from huge investments in the wrong technologies to a reluctance to exit loss-making businesses. A manufacturing bubble here in the mid-2000s — fed partly by an unusually weak currency and Americans flush with cash from rising home prices — masked continued weaknesses in their business models and spurred the companies to take big bets that backfired.

When the global financial crisis brought that boom to an end in 2008, the three were saddled with excess capacity, bloated work forces and investments that they could hardly hope to recoup. And their refusal to make a big enough departure from the ways of their glory years is now making a comeback difficult.

“Many investors are longing for reforms that will let all of the pus out,” Yuji Fujimori, technology analyst at Barclays Capital in Tokyo, said in a recent note to clients.

Sharp’s stumble, in many ways, has been the most humbling. It was the biggest beneficiary of the manufacturing bubble: from 2000 to 2007, its profits jumped 150 percent. Sharp’s high-end Aquos liquid-crystal display televisions — which it manufactured at state-of-the-art factories in Kameyama, in western Japan — were a runaway hit in the nascent flat-panel market. The spinoff Aquos cellphone topped Japanese sales rankings. Sharp’s solar batteries also sold briskly, helped by a bubble in green technologies.

The company’s success during this period seemed to validate Japan’s penchant for manufacturing their most important products in-house. In advertisements, Sharp showed off its cutting-edge factories.

But even before the financial crisis, analysts were warning of an impending crash in prices of flat-panel televisions, which were fast becoming commodities that cheap upstarts could emulate. In 2008, the iPhone made its debut in Japan, the end of an era for Japanese-style cellphones. Chinese upstarts were starting to flood global markets with cheap solar panels and batteries. In consumer electronics, outsourced manufacturing became the norm.

Still, Sharp did not change course. It built a new factory in Sakai, Japan, which could make 6 million large LCD panels a year — more than the size of the global market at the time. Sharp missed the smartphone wave, and its cellphone sales in Japan halved from 2007 to 2012. And in late 2011, the solar bubble burst, driving many solar power companies into bankruptcy and Sharp’s solar batteries business into the red. The unit has not turned a profit since.

Now, the Kameyama factories no longer make televisions but panels for Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

Panasonic, for its part, also bet heavily on plasma televisions in 2003, pouring some 600 billion yen into a series of factories in Amagasaki, not far from Sharp’s own plant. It also bet on solar panels and rechargeable batteries, buying Sanyo in 2009.

But with plasma now a fading technology and solar power struggling, Panasonic is saddled with major losses. Last year, it announced that a factory in Amagasaki was closing, less than two years after it opened.

Kazuhiro Tsuga, who took the helm at Panasonic this year, was blunt in describing his company’s predicament. “We are among the losers in consumer electronics," he told a news conference on Wednesday. He now promises to shift the company away from money-losing televisions and gadgets.

Of the three, Sony now seems the most prescient. Its executives have preached the power of networks and content since the 1990s, building up a vast catalog of music and movies to lure users to their devices. Sony has also moved to slash costs and jobs and sell off some unprofitable businesses, refocusing the company on digital cameras and imaging technology, video games and mobile devices. This quarter, the sale of its chemical products business, which made materials for LCDs and optical discs, helped alleviate losses. Sony is now making a push into the medical field with an investment in the endoscope maker Olympus.

Internal squabbling has quashed its efforts to marry its hardware and software, however, and it refuses to abandon one of its biggest money-losers, its television business, which has bled red ink for eight consecutive years.

“We intend to hunker down and build a profitable business,” Masaru Kato, Sony’s chief financial officer, told a news conference Thursday. “And where we can, we will chase new markets.”