NEW YORK (

TheStreet

)

-- Sony Corporation

(NYSE:

SNE

) has been upgraded by TheStreet Ratings from hold to buy. The company's strengths can be seen in multiple areas, such as its robust revenue growth, attractive valuation levels, good cash flow from operations, growth in earnings per share and largely solid financial position with reasonable debt levels by most measures. We feel these strengths outweigh the fact that the company has had lackluster performance in the stock itself.

Highlights from the ratings report include:

The current debt-to-equity ratio, 0.35, is low and is below the industry average, implying that there has been successful management of debt levels. Despite the fact that SNE's debt-to-equity ratio is low, the quick ratio, which is currently 0.62, displays a potential problem in covering short-term cash needs.

SONY CORP's earnings per share improvement from the most recent quarter was slightly positive. The company has demonstrated a pattern of positive earnings per share growth over the past year. We feel that this trend should continue. During the past fiscal year, SONY CORP continued to lose money by earning -$0.43 versus -$1.04 in the prior year. This year, the market expects an improvement in earnings ($1.11 versus -$0.43).

Net operating cash flow has slightly increased to $3,594.89 million or 8.54% when compared to the same quarter last year. In addition, SONY CORP has also modestly surpassed the industry average cash flow growth rate of 4.16%.

Despite its growing revenue, the company underperformed as compared with the industry average of 27.2%. Since the same quarter one year prior, revenues rose by 18.7%. This growth in revenue appears to have trickled down to the company's bottom line, improving the earnings per share.

Sony Corporation designs, develops, manufactures, and sells electronic equipment, instruments, and devices for consumer, professional, and industrial markets worldwide. The company has a P/E ratio of 8.7, below the average consumer durables industry P/E ratio of 32.3 and below the S&P 500 P/E ratio of 16.7. Sony has a market cap of $30.6 billion and is part of the

consumer goods

sector and

consumer durables

industry. Shares are down 16.8% year to date as of the close of trading on Thursday.

You can view the full

Sony Ratings Report

or get investment ideas from our

investment research center

.

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