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Japan's Sharp falls as losses mount, Sony picks up

US-SHARP-SHARES:Japan's Sharp falls as losses mount, Sony picks up

TOKYO (Reuters) - Shares of Japan's Sharp Corp fell 3 percent on Friday, a day after the TV maker almost doubled its full-year net loss forecast to $5.6 billion and warned that it might not be able to survive on its own.

Rival Sony Corp rose 3.5 percent, however, after posting a small operating profit in the July-September quarter and keeping its full-year profit guidance unchanged on Thursday.

Sharp shares were trading at 164 yen in early trade. After the market close on Thursday, the maker of Aquos TVs warned that it was seeing a "serious negative operating cash flow".

Sharp nearly doubled its forecast full-year net loss to 450 billion yen ($5.62 billion) after taking a $1.1 billion restructuring charge in July-September. At an operating level, it expects a loss of 155 billion yen.

"Sharp expects major earnings improvement in the second half as it posted greater inventory and capital write-downs in the first half than planned, and plans to cut personnel and other fixed costs," Goldman Sachs said in a research note.

"However, sales guidance for small/midsize LCDs and solar cells looks optimistic, and we think second half guidance looks difficult."

Sony booked a small quarterly operating profit, helped by the sale of a non-core chemicals business, and kept its forecast for a full-year operating profit of 130 billion yen.

But the maker of Bravia TVs, Vaio laptops and PlayStation game consoles said it expected to sell fewer of its hand-held PSP and Vita game consoles this year than it previously estimated. It also cut forecasts for sales of its TV sets and compact digital cameras, but kept its PlayStation home console and smartphone sales estimates intact.

Panasonic Corp started off the latest round of bad news for Japan's big consumer electronics makers on Wednesday, saying it will lose 765 billion yen this business year as it writes down goodwill and assets and prepares for more restructuring.

Shares of Panasonic fell 1 percent, versus a 1.2 percent rise in the Nikkei average.

($1 = 80.1400 Japanese yen)

(Reporting by Dominic Lau, James Topham in Tokyo, Umesh Desai in Hong Kong; Editing by Edwina Gibbs and Edmund Klamann)

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