Last week Samsung Electronics Co. and HTC released their 2012 Q1 guidance reports in which Samsung was noted to be performing remarkably well, while HTC was in a bit of a rut.  More companies are expected to release theirs any day now.  For now, let’s look at out how Sony Corp. and Apple Inc. are doing in the market.

Sony suffers massive loss

Just a day after Sony announced that they will be replacing Howard Stringer with Kazuo Hirai as chief executive officer, the company reported that they are expecting an annual loss of $2.9 billion – a brutal way to welcome a new CEO who officially took the position on April 1st.

If you thought $2.9 billion was bad, then you might want to skip this article.  Sony just reported that the amount more than doubled.  They reported an estimated annual loss of 520 billion yen or $6.4 billion due to tax charge.

No wonder the Japanese company is cutting some 10,000 jobs and selling off parts of their business.  They need to cut down operating costs in order to make up for their declining sales.

“They could certainly become profitable through downsizing and shrinking some of their loss-making businesses this year, but we’ll have to wait and see if they can continuously be profitable,” said Yuuki Sakurai, head of fund manager Fukoku Capital, who oversees about 1.5 trillion yen worth of assets.  “I think Sony is fighting with its old image. People think Sony can succeed (by doing what it did in the past), when there is a limit to what they can really do (in the current competitive landscape).”

Still, Sony is not losing hope, as they project an operating profit of 180 billion yen ($2.2 billion) in the current year that would end in March 2013.  Their expected profit may be due to the massive job cuts, or they’re banking on the success of their new smartphones, which they announced at Mobile World Congress last February.

Apple achieves new high

While Sony announced their expected a $2.9 billion annual loss, Apple was celebrating the fact that the International Data Corporation (IDC) named them as the third largest mobile phone manufacturer.  Later that month, it was reported that Apple passed the $500 billion mark in trading, making them the sixth company to reach that milestone.

Critics questioned the company’s ability to maintain that value, wondering if the company would crash and burn just like the five other companies, namely Intel, Cisco, General Electric, Microsoft and Exxon Mobile, who reached the same milestone but failed to maintain the lead.

In what could be called an in-your-face moment, just over a month since hitting the $500 billion mark Apple reached the $600 billion mark when company shares rose to a new 52-week high this morning at $644.

Apple is the second publicly traded company to hit the $600 billion market cap, the first was Microsoft back in December 30, 1999 when the company reached an intraday high share price of $119.94 with 5,160,024,593 outstanding shares resulting to a $618.9 billion market cap.

To date, Apple has the highest market cap among publicly traded companies.