Sony Corp said on Thursday it would buy back shares worth up to 200 billion yen ($1.83 billion), or 4.8% of stock, through March 31, 2020, in an effort to boost shareholder returns. It follows a share buyback of 100 billion yen, its first ever, announced in February.

This guys are not on your side, they are your enemies.

Update on cameras sales predictions.

Sales in locked down areas of EU and US are expected to drop 90-95%. Around 90% of all remaining smaller retailers won't make it past this. Info from one of distributors.

How China’s Chip Industry Defied the Coronavirus Lockdown

Beginning in February, Yangtze Memory sent cars to the station to pick up groups of staff, depositing them at a self-quarantine dormitory for a week before they were allowed to enter the main working area, sources close to the project told Nikkei.

These secret trips, which have not yet been reported, brought volunteer employees back to the center of the epidemic to relieve some 300 engineers who had been working on rotating shifts at the factory since the shutdown began. Many were young professionals under the age of 30, who were originally assigned to cover the Lunar New Year but then became stranded at the facility. For more than a month, they labored to keep the plant running.

“They are banned from leaving the company campus and are under massive pressure. ... Most of them work more than 10 to 12 hours a day and are on call all the time,” said an industry source familiar with the matter. The government also lifted labor regulations to allow employees to work more than the mandatory cap of 36 hours overtime a month.

.....

Remarkably, Yangtze Memory was even hiring for positions in engineering, operations, integration, production business development and marketing — and most of these new openings were based in Wuhan. “We will stay away from the virus, but we will not keep ourselves away from good talent,” declared a job advert posted on Feb. 26 and March 3.

That the Chinese government — which shut off huge swathes of the country’s economy to limit the spread of Covid-19 — was prepared to risk further contagion to keep this factory running shows how committed it has become in its desire to build a powerful domestic chip sector. With high-technology industries increasingly caught up in geopolitical tensions, China is desperate to decouple its companies from their reliance on U.S. imports, and to build homegrown competitors to the American, South Korean and Taiwanese companies that dominate the market. Beijing has thrown billions of dollars at the industry, creating a nascent boom that not even a global pandemic could deflate.

https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-03-18/how-chinas-chip-industry-defied-the-coronavirus-lockdown-101530340.html

Some info from my Japanese sources.

All major camera companies hope for special Bank of Japan money transfers or buyouts. None of them will be able to make it without helicopter money. Ricoh division and Olympus camera divisions can merge with other cameras companies as soon as May.

Global PC sales are set to fall over 30% on year in the first half of 2020, due to poor sales in China, Europe and the US in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak,

Around 80% of this plunge is not due to bad sales, but due to non working production. But this is being kept silent. Other 20% is from corporations sales fall.

NIKON UK WILL NOT CLOSE DOWN! The employees that are being laid off are outsourced by a third party company in the UK. They are not Nikon emoployees. The staff is going through the process right now. The affected people already all know. Most of the laid-off employees are in-store reps and their jobs will be terminated on April 12th.

We are facing biggest layoffs wave in the industry in all its history.

Some companies, like Olympus can have 1-3 staff left per country (and all services and offices shut and sold) in July.

Global motherboard and graphics card shipments are set to drop to record-low levels in the first half of 2020

Microsoft is closing its store locations around the world in response to the escalating coronavirus outbreak. In an email to customers, the company said, "We are closing Microsoft Store locations to help protect the health and safety of our customers and employees

"Preparations for photokina continue according to the current status for the specified date. We look forward to your participation. Cologne, March 17th, 2020"

Must be a joke now.

Espen