Nikkei stays down as Sony tumbles

Japan's Nikkei share average dropped 0.8 percent on Wednesday to mark its seventh consecutive session of losses as fresh concerns about Spanish and Italian finances and slowing global growth sapped investor appetite. Sony Corp and Sharp Corp's forecast of bigger annual losses and a firmer yen also weighed on Japanese electronics companies.
The Nikkei was down 79.28 points at 9,458.74, extending its worst run since July 2009. Sony tumbled 4.5 percent after the consumer electronics company forecast a record $6.4 billion annual net loss on Tuesday, doubling an earlier forecast and marking a fourth consecutive year in the red.
Toshiyuki Kanayama, a senior market analyst at Monex Inc, said Sony's steep losses were unlikely to continue into Thursday, but the core problem faced by the company remains. "The issue is that they don't have any new products to move forward with," he said, adding that Panasonic Corp and Sharp suffer from a similar problem. Sharp shed 3.2 percent after it raised its overall loss forecast for the year that ended March to a record net deficit of 380 billion yen ($4.70 billion), a 31 percent increase from an earlier estimate.
"Japan's consumer electronics industry is facing defeat," said Fujio Ando, senior managing director of Chibagin Asset Management. Toyota Motor Corp, Honda Motor Co and Panasonic fell between 1.2 and 2.2 percent. Monex's Kanayama said the next psychologically key level would be around 9,200, edging towards its 200-day moving average at 9,093. The index has lost 6.2 percent so far in April after rising more than 19 percent in the January-March period.
The broader Topix index lost 0.9 percent to finish at 805.84. Nearly 2.1 billion shares changed hands on the main board, up from 1.93 billion shares on Tuesday. "The problem is Europe ... we have been worried about Greece and have largely overlooked the problems in Italy, Spain and European peripherals," said Yutaka Miura, senior technical analyst at Mizuho Securities.
Most market participants remained optimistic that the Bank of Japan will take additional accommodative measures and give Tokyo equities a boost at its meeting later this month after it refrained from action at Tuesday's meeting. However, HSBC was sceptical that the BoJ had become serious about quantitative easing and remained "underweight" on Japanese equities.