Sony Corp. sold its stake in the venture with Samsung Electronics Co. to make liquid-crystal displays to the South Korean company after predicting an eighth consecutive year of losses from TVs amid sluggish demand. Samsung will pay 1.08 trillion won ($935 US million) in cash for Sony's stake in S-LCD Corp., a venture formed in 2004, the Suwon, South Korea-based company said in a statement today. Sony, which invested 1.65 trillion won in the venture, will take a charge of about 66 billion yen ($846 US million) in the quarter ending Dec. 31 after the deal, Japan's biggest consumer- electronics exporter said in its statement. The stake sale enables Sony Chief Executive Officer Howard Stringer, 69, to shed the responsibility of panel manufacturing amid losses in the TV business, where Samsung is the world's biggest. To turn around Sony, which has forecast a fourth consecutive annual loss this year, Stringer has announced $8.4 US billion of acquisitions in 2011 to bolster the profitable phones and music divisions and introduced tablet computers to challenge Apple Inc.'s iPad. Read more: http://www.vancouversun.com/Samsung Sony stake from/5911418/story.html#ixzz1hewmFPR8
