Within seconds of Sony’s profit warning, analysts, traders and veteran observers of the Japanese icon had invoked the weary old “Sony Shock” phrase — first used in 2003 when the company really was in trouble and the revelation knocked everyone sideways.

Certainly, the huge cut in operating profit forecast announced today was nasty. But “Sony Shock” is the wrong phrase for two reasons: first, it should not have been a shock to anyone with half an eye on the currency markets, and second, the company is not the same Sony it was five years ago.

On the currency front, it is hard to see how the company could have managed its portfolio of risk exposures very much differently: it happens to be a Japanese company with a lot of exports to the United States and that profile has suited the company pretty well since 1946. The yen-dollar exchange rate plugged into the company’s profit assumptions appears to have been Y105, and the bottom-line damage wrought by every Y1 rise against the greenback is well known.

Sony is a victim of the unwinding of the gargantuan global investment gamble that was the yen-carry trade, and there is every reason to believe that the yen’s current strength will dissolve: after all, there will soon come a point where the Japanese economy is identified as weak and vulnerable, and its currency will fall back to earth and possibly below Sony’s Y105 level.

But, more critically, Sony is a far, far better company than it was in 2003. Or, at least, it is no longer a passively managed collection of warring divisions. There are still, of course, the nagging doubts and it is probably in the nature of Sony that there always will be. The company was surprisingly negative on the outlook for Sony Financial Holdings, and far more so than the underlying market decline would suggest. Analysts have speculated that Sony has got some higher risk investments in there than the market realises and cautioned of a possible hit to management credibility if those turn out to be real horror shows.

But even amid the maelstrom, there were analysts who still view the company as a turnaround story. Sir Howard Stringer is not a miracle worker but he has marshalled Sony’s talents more effectively than his immediate predecessors. The games and movie divisions are in decent health, despite the sudden weakness of the US consumer, and the newly launched PSP games console is far outselling Nintendo’s DS.

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