I would tell you that no one in our industry is doing more to improve working conditions than Apple. We are constantly auditing facilities, going deep into the supply chain, looking for problems, finding problems, and fixing problems. And we report everything, because we believe that transparency is so very important in this area.

– Apple CEO Tim Cook, at Tuesday’s Goldman Sachs conference

The list of 156 companies came along with a major report — one of the company’s largest ever — divulging the results of its recent factory inspections.

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The Dallas-based company had already issued warnings about the impact on its two factories in the quake zone. In reporting first-quarter results Monday, TI put costs associated with the disaster at $30 million, which reduced earnings per share for the period ended in March by about two cents. In addition, the company suffered about $20 million in lost sales, said Ron Slaymaker, TI’s vice president of investor relations.

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The virus, first detected in June, marked the first large-scale attack on the type of industrial computer systems that are used to monitor controls for large automated factories, utilities, nuclear power plants and water treatment systems, security analysts said.

Dubbed Stuxnet and spread by devices plugged into USB computer ports, the virus targets industrial process control systems made by Siemens and is programmed to try to steal data from them.

The German engineering giant is one of the world’s largest makers of such automated systems—one reason the company and security researchers believe its systems were the target. Last year, Munich-based Siemens (SI) generated €7 billion ($9 billion) in sales from its industrial-controls business.

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Samsung’s TV manufacturing business has nearly doubled in size since 2006–the year it surpassed Sony Corp. (SNE) to become the world’s biggest seller of TV sets–and the company is closing in on 20 percent global market share in TV unit sales, a threshold not reached by any manufacturer since the earliest days of the industry more than 60 years ago.

Of course, success comes with costs. Unlike many of its rivals, who have increasingly outsourced production to reduce costs, Samsung has ramped up TV manufacturing almost entirely on its own, relying on outside contractors only to finish tube TVs in a handful of less-affluent markets.

Samsung executives say they prefer to control production for quality assurance and to keep a direct eye on costs. But now the company finds itself in the unusual position of having to expand its own TV factories.

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“If we were any more successful, we’d be bankrupt.”

– Sony CEO Howard Stringer on the company’s LCD business, May 28, 2008

About the best thing to be said for Sony’s grotesque financial results is that they came in smaller than expected. The company’s 98.9 billion yen ($1 billion) loss for the fiscal year ended March–its first net loss in 14 years–wasn’t nearly as bad as the 150.0 billion yen ($1.57 billion) figure it had predicted in January or even close to the 173.8 billion yen ($1.8 billion) analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had been forecasting. And the same is true for Sony’s fourth quarter, as well. The net loss of 165.1 billion yen ($1.7 billion) it reported was far better than the 228.7 billion yen ($2.39 billion) forecast.

Still ugly as hell, though. And according to the company’s leadership, its next fiscal year will be little different. Sony is forecasting a loss of 120 billion yen ($1.2 billion). Given that unfortunate outlook, Sony (SNE) is closing three factories in Japan, part of an ongoing effort to shore up a business ravaged by the worst recession in decades. But cost-cutting measures like that can only do so much.

As analysts note, what Sony really needs is a killer product. It is no longer the force it once was in consumer electronics, having ceded its dominance in portable music players to Apple (AAPL) and its leads in the television and videogame console markets to Samsung Electronics and Nintendo. “Their outlook gave me the impression that their business is heading for a gradual recovery,” Fujio Ando, senior managing director at Chibagin Asset Management, told Reuters. “But it would all depend on whether they would be able to start producing popular products, because right now they have no ‘Number One’ products. I see Sony’s branding power weakening.”

And that’s something of which Sony is painfully aware.

“We have two distinct challenges facing us,” Sony CEO Howard Stringer recently told the New York Times. “The first is the global slowdown, which forces us to make significant adjustments. The second challenge is the evolution of our competitive environment. New competitors [are] springing out everywhere.”

Indeed. And while Sony seems to be meeting the first challenge, albeit slowly, it hasn’t yet begun to make headway toward meeting the second. And at this point, one wonders if the company is even capable anymore. As Japanese Economy, Trade and Industry Minister and former Sony employee Akira Amari asked back in October 2006, “What has become of the Sony known for its technology?”