Sony Corp. said Friday that it won't be able to issue its financial results for the October-December quarter because of the damage caused by last year's massive cyberattack on movie studio Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.
Sony nonetheless plans to update shareholders and others on its estimate for the group's third-quarter earnings at a news conference on Feb. 4, when it originally planned to announce the quarterly results.
Because the November attacked destroyed the Hollywood studio's computer hardware and virtually wiped out all of its data, most of its financial and accounting applications won't be working until early February, Sony said.
As a result, it said, Sony has asked financial regulators to extend the deadline for filing its financial report to March 31 from Feb. 16.
As to how the cyberattack will impact its earnings, Sony said it "currently believes that such impact is not material."
The U.S. government has blamed the cyberattack on North Korea, which was angered by Sony Pictures' new movie, "The Interview," a comedy about attempt to assassinate the reclusive communist country's leader Kim Jong Un.
North Korea denied any involvement in the attack, which put a trove of embarrassing internal company data online, including unpublished movies, scripts, salary data and email.
Sony President Kazuo Hirai said this month that the U.S. unit was unable to block the unusually destructive attack because it was highly sophisticated.