Budget analysis of Sony

Breakeven Analysis

Sony Flexible Budget Analysis

Sony is a company that has long dominated the electronics market. However, in recent years, it has seemed to loose its primary grip over the market. Still, examining the financials of 2013, one can see that there have been new advancements in growth, especially in regards to net income, operating income, and financial and mobile sales revenues.

After several years of disappointing sales, Sony has seen some recent growth streams. Sales and operating revenue is up from the past two years by 4.7% (Sony, 2013). Additionally, net income is also up since 2012. There have also been increases in the sales of financial services and mobile devices over the past year (Sony, 2013). This has helped increase the overall operating revenue and net income overall, which was desperately needed by Sony after several years of the company loosing its grip on the marketplace. Numbers seen from March 2013 show promising growth for the company in an era where competition within the market environment is extremely intense. In fact, recent developments with major competitors continue to threaten Sony's ability to foster new growth. For example, Apple recently acquired Beats by Dre, which threatens not only Sony's own investments in headphones, but also the development of Beat technology in new Apple iPhones and other mobile devices. Sony's major growth recently has been within the mobile market, and thus it will have to really invest further into this market segment in order to compete with Apple and its new acquisition of Beats by Dre.

Flexible Budget for Sony

Actual

Budget

Sales Units

Sales

$6,800,900,000,000

$6,500,000,000

Costs of Goods Sold

$1,300,131.00

$1,300,131.00

Gross Profit

826,892,000.00

826,892,000.00

General and Administrative Expenses

$458,814,000.00

$500,000,000

Operating Income

$230,100,000,000

$230,100,000,000

Income Taxes

$200,000,000,000

$200,000,000,000

Net Income

$43,000,000,000

$43,000,000,000

Flexible budget reports do differ from a static budget, where there is little room for changes. Essentially, a flexible budget performance report uses real activity through activity variances as a way to compare to the revenue and spending variances. When using flexible budgets, a business would "input the actual revenues or other activity measures into the flexible budget once an accounting period has been completed, and it generates a budget that is specific to the inputs" (Accounting Tools, 2014). This allows it to remain more fluid and flexible than other budgetary comparison measures, which can often yield different results at various points in time. Such performance reporting can show what departments are balancing the budget, and which may be exceeding their portion of the budget.