Within seconds of Sony's profit warning, analysts, traders and veteran observers of the company 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 forecast operating profits announced yesterday was nasty. But “Sony Shock” is the wrong phrase for two reasons: first, it should not really have been a shock to anyone with an eye on the currency markets and, secondly, 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 105 yen, and the bottom-line damage wrought by every 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, possibly below Sony's 105 yen level.

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 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, far more so than the underlying market decline would suggest. Analysts have speculated that Sony has some higher-risk investments in there than the market realises, and gave warning of a possible hit to management credibility if they turn out to be 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 new PSP games console is far outselling Nintendo's DS.

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