During a news conference at its headquarters in Tokyo on the projected annual loss, equivalent to $6.4 billion, the electronics and entertainment company stopped short of confirming reports that it planned to eliminate 10,000 jobs, a weighty move in a country where staff cuts are considered a breach of a company’s social contract.
But the chief financial officer, Masaru Kato, said that all options were under consideration as Sony pushes ahead with a restructuring drive. The company expects the effort will catapult it back to profitability for the current financial year, which ends next March, with an operating profit of ¥180 billion.
“We will force through reforms, and there will be no sacred cows,” Mr. Kato said. “The company management takes these numbers very seriously.”
The projected loss for the year that ended March 31 underscores the grave challenges facing Kazuo Hirai, who succeeded Howard Stringer at Sony’s helm this month. Once a much-emulated and coveted darling of the technology industry, Sony is a shadow of its former self, its problems mirroring a wider decline in the Japanese consumer electronics industry.
Another struggling electronics maker, Sharp, announced Tuesday that it now expected a loss of ¥380 billion for the financial year that ended March 31, also far worse than its previous forecast of ¥290 billion.
But the fall has been most spectacular at Sony, which has long lost its dominance in portable music players, unable to translate its Walkman success into the modern era. Sony’s television business, which has not been able to recover from a delay in developing flat-panel models and has more recently been badly hurt by price competition from rivals, has not posted a profit in years.
Mr. Kato said that tepid sales of TVs, especially in the United States, Sony’s biggest market, were hurting profitability most at the manufacturer. But he also blamed the strong yen, which has battered Sony’s profitability abroad, as well as the lingering effects of damage from the tsunami in Japan last year and flooding in the manufacturing hub of Thailand.
The immediate losses, however, came from an additional tax expense of ¥300 billion in the financial fourth quarter because of a revaluation of tax credits in the United States that are unlikely to be utilized because of annual losses. The latest forecast is more than twice Sony’s previous projection, made in February, for a net loss of ¥220 billion.
Following the announcement by Sony, the Japanese credit ratings agency R&I put Sony on watch for a downgrade, saying that the manufacturer would require time to bolster profitability. The agency currently rates Sony at A+, five notches down from its top rating.
“In light of Sony’s business portfolio centered on television, the business environment is challenging, and R&I is increasingly concerned that improvement in revenue and expenditure will require further time,” the agency said in a news release .
One important challenge will be how much Sony will be able to reduce its bloated work force. It employs 168,200 people worldwide, most of them in Japan, where cuts are difficult under strict labor law and deep-rooted expectations for lifetime employment. A top executive involved with Sony’s last round of cuts, in 2008, which sought to eliminate 16,000 jobs, said he had been surprised to find that many of those supposedly taken off the company payroll had eventually bounced back to positions at the company or at subsidiaries.
Mr. Kato said that any job cuts would include positions from a liquid crystal display unit and small chemical business, which are being spun off from Sony. But the Nikkei business daily, which first reported the larger job-cut figure, said that jobs were likely to go from Sony’s money-losing TV business.
Another challenge will be reaping the benefits of a long-elusive strategy at Sony of bringing together its entertainment properties — which include the music of the late Michael Jackson, the blockbuster Spiderman movie franchise and popular video game titles like Gran Turismo — and its electronics. Company executives have long said that strategy would help differentiate Sony gadgets in an increasingly commoditized industry.
But Sony has stumbled on its online networks, the crucial link between its software and hardware offerings, falling far behind companies like Apple in offering content over the Internet.
Analysts also point out that Sony needs to focus its resources on its strengths, like its entertainment and video games units, and abandon areas, like televisions, in which it is no longer competitive. But Mr. Hirai has previously denied that Sony would go so far, saying the company was not prepared to give up on such a central and time-honored business.
Sony shares fell 3.5 percent in Tokyo before the announcement, while the benchmark Nikkei index fell 0.1 percent. The company’s shares have almost halved in value in little more than a year. The decline Tuesday was the biggest one-day drop in three weeks. 

By