The proposal was put forward by Third Point LLC CEO Daniel Loeb, who manages the largest owner of Sony stock, which is worth $1.1 billion. In a May 14 letter to Sony president and CEO Kazuo Hirai, Loeb suggested that the company sell 15-20 percent of Sony Entertainment to current shareholders, a move he believes could help the company by rewarding management based on their performance.

At the time, a statement from Sony reiterated that "the entertainment businesses are important contributors to Sony's growth and are not for sale." However, Bloomberg reported last week that the company was considering the proposal, and CEO Kazuo Hirai said that the board would "come to a decision that represents Sony's stance."

Sony reported net profit this year after five straight years of losses and later doubled its earnings forecast. As part of an effort to boost its financial outlook, the company sold its North American headquarters and its "Sony City Osaki" property (pictured above) recently. Its next-gen console, the PlayStation 4, is expected to be released later this year, and the company said that it's not expecting to incur the kinds of major financial losses that it did with the PlayStation 3.

Polygon: Report: Sony working with Morgan Stanley and Citigroup to research sale of Entertainment division

I sort just don't understand what its Entertainment Division is.. Is it like its movies, or music?. Or like its television studios and stuff?. I mean I guess they could just spin it off as its own company. But hmm?.

Microsoft should buy it.

You completely misunderstood this article. What Loeb suggested was that Sony list its entertainment division as a separate entity from the Sony monolith that is currently traded on markets. I'm not a financial expert, so I can't speak to the specific benefits of doing so, but apparently due to the Entertainment division's great profitability, this would be a very popular stock with investors. Selling a 20% share of a company is not the same as selling a company. You would need to be selling >50% for that.

I'm not sure if Sony's entertainment division includes games, but it definitely includes music and I think it includes movies.

According to the quote all they're talking about is liquidating some capital by selling some more of their company to people that already has shares in it. I don't know how many shares they hold, but I highly doubt they would sell enough to give away their power. It's just a big "would it be smart to get some money now, or do we want to wait and hope our stock goes higher" thing. Probably has something to do with the upcoming release of PS4 and people being more eager to invest in hopes it will be a big success.

The target of the proposed IPO is the film, television and music companies, or some portion of them. That would leave the Playstation division grouped with the electronics side of the company, which would probably be a bad thing in the long term.

The proposal is pretty clearly about splitting the most profitable aspects of the company from the least profitable. It would be great for investors, especially those with a lot of traditional Sony stock who would probably tear your arm off for the opportunity to ditch that in favor of Sony Entertainment stock. It would probably be good for the divisions of the company which get spun off. I don't see how it benefits Sony's core business or their traditional stock beyond the short-term influx of cash.

I wonder if there exists a similarity in forum thread and news story headline psychology on the part of the creators. For instance, this thread title is far too concrete and presumptive given the actual source and this I find often in news stories as well. Hrm.

That Sony are considering how to respond to the proposal is a known fact, the speculative aspect is that they are actively working towards some form of appeasement.

Basically they want to split the Entertainment Section of Sony completely They do not want to sell it.

The reason to do this is so that Sony "Main" can do things by treating Sony "ED" as "wholly own company" instead of just another component. A company would only do this if it had value and attracted investors to that unit instead of investors who want to invest in Sony.

The take away is that international business is a bunch of fakery. :)