Sony comes back from the brink, and it’s not all thanks to Spider-Man

After losing more than 3bn in 2012, Japan's tech giant is fighting its way back to record profits under Kazuo Hirai, partly by working with Apple rather than trying to beat it. Investments in PlayStation and TV production have also helped

Six years after reporting its biggest-ever loss, Sony is no longer a conglomerate in freefall. Last week the Japanese group behind the Bravia TV set, the PlayStation, Beyonci(C) and the Spider-Man films said it was on track to set a new annual profit record - expecting to beat its previous corporate best of 526bn (3.5bn) by 20%.

It has been a long journey for the group after years of underperformance and missed targets, including most recently a 800m writedown of its Sony Pictures film division. But at last week's quarterly results update, the company stated that the film unit was one of the company's strongest performers and would help it beat the record profits it made in 1997-98: the year it released Men in Black, and when Steve Jobs had yet to release the Walkman-killing iPod.

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