Sony: London warehouse fire may affect UK deliveries

Fire destroys a Sony warehouse in Enfield in north London August 9, 2011.

TOKYO (Reuters) - Sony Corp said on Tuesday deliveries in Britain of compact discs and DVDs could be affected after a fire hit its sole warehouse for content products in the country.

The fire in the insured three-storey, 20,000 square metre warehouse was put out after starting late Monday or early Tuesday in London's Enfield neighbourhood, the site of scattered incidents as riots spread from the Tottenham area over the fatal shooting of a man by armed police.

"There will likely be some impact on deliveries," said Yoko Yasukochi, a spokeswoman at the Japanese electronics and entertainment conglomerate in Tokyo.

"We cannot determine the cause of the fire or the extent of the damage yet because it's not possible to enter the building," she said. No injuries have been reported from the fire, she added.

Britain has been engulfed since Saturday in its worst rioting, looting and arson in decades after violence first broke out in London's northern Tottenham district when a peaceful protest over the police shooting of a suspect two days earlier turned into looting.

Shares in Sony settled down 1.1 percent at 1,739 yen on Tuesday, slightly better than the benchmark Nikkei average, which fell 1.7 percent on the day.

(Reporting by Chang-Ran Kim, Nathan Layne; Editing by Joseph Radford)