For people who think Sony should stay in these loss making markets and try and turn their units around I would point them towards Panasonic, they enacted real and proper reforms by cutting out unprofitable divisions and refocussing towards B2B products and they have returned to operating profitability and turned a net loss of ca. 400bn yen into a 100bn net profit forecast (which the have a good chance of beating). With the sale and loss made on the Vaio division, Sony will post a net loss in the region of 40bn yen, a reversal from a net profit of 35bn last year and a forecast of 45bn.
With the sale of the Vaio division, the next logical move is the sale of the TV division or closing down of manufacturing and refocussing it completely towards 4K and leaving low margin 1080p products behind completely.
Sony's presence in electronics should be limited to design, engineering and supply chain management. Manufacturing of components and assembly should be completely outsourced. The profitable smartphone and gaming divisions use this model to great effect. There is absolutely no reason for Sony to make Wintel laptops, it is a low margin market with little to no fringe benefits for the company because of standardised software configurations. With smartphones and gaming products Sony has a the opportunity to push their own ecosystem because they are still a somewhat walled garden and ship with fully customised software. Imaging makes sense because they are the world leader in sensor design and production, plus prosumer cameras have very nice margins. What needs to speed up is their transition away from cheap digital compacts to premium RX cameras, and speeding up their lens releases for ILCE cameras.
Really though, TVs are the area that kills them, at last count there were 45-55k people employed within Sony working directly or indirectly on TVs, most of them in manufacturing and assembly. Shedding these positions either by selling the division or cutting out manufacturing and assembly would yield a significantly lower fixed cost base allowing for higher margins and profitability. FWIW, our calculation made early in 2012 said Sony had baseline net profitability of just 30bn yen in a given year, which is a 0.5% net profit margin. That baseline has actually decreased since then because of poor performance from the Vaio division. The TV division was also a poor performer. I believe without those two divisions baseline profitability was closer to 300bn net profit per year and the net profit margin was close to 7%, because of a huge revenue loss from exiting TVs. On that basis, Sony's target share price would rise to around 4000 yen, giving instant shareholder returns.
There is literally no reason for Sony to be in TV manufacturing other than some odd sense of sentimental attachment.