Ahead of its official earnings call, Japanese electronics giant Sony changed its estimate of the net loss for its fiscal year ending March 2011 to $3.2 billion, reversing its earlier projection of a return to profit. The company attributed the loss largely to writing off 360 billion yen ($4.4 billion) related to a tax credit, though other factors are also involved. The PlayStation Network security breach and regional natural disasters, along with growing competition all left their mark on the company’s earnings this past quarter.

“Like many other Japanese manufacturers, Sony has been hampered by the production disruptions set off by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 25,000 people, destroyed many factories and sent the nation’s economic recovery into reverse.”

In addition to the tsunami, Sony suffered another major blow due to the PlayStation Network hack – one of the biggest and most sophisticated cyber attacks in history. Initially, it took Sony over a week to find out about the hack in the first place, at which point it shut down its entire gaming network for just under 24 days. The company spent a total of about $170 million to cover the costs of identity theft insurance for customers, improvements to network security, customer support and an investigation into the hacking. We’ve eventually learned that the hackers leveraged AWS as the starting point for the attack.

The hacking of PSN compromised the personal information of tens of millions of customers, who were unable to play online for nearly a month. These two factors added up to a serious PR blow for the company, leaving competition to bite into its market share.

The company reported a 40.8 billion yen ($439 million) loss for the fiscal year ended March 2010 after a 98.9 billion yen loss the year before – Sony’s first annual red ink in 14 years.