“Japan’s Sony Corp. said on Monday it would unveil a long-awaited restructuring plan on September 22, aimed at turning around the struggling electronics and entertainment giant,” Reuters reports.
“Sony, maker of Vaio PCs and PlayStation game machines, had said it would announce a new strategy in late September to reallocate resources, suggesting it would look to trim its product lineup or downsize poorly performing businesses. Chief Executive Howard Stringer, the first foreigner at the helm of the Japanese electronics conglomerate, President Ryoji Chubachi and Chief Financial Officer Nobuyuki Oneda are scheduled to attend the meeting,” Reuters reports.
“One area in need of repair is Sony’s television unit, which lost 25.7 billion yen on an operating basis in the past business year on weak sales of traditional cathode ray tube sets and sinking prices of liquid crystal display models,” Reuters reports. “The inventor of the Walkman is also trying to regain its footing in the portable music player market where it has been outmaneuvered by Apple Computer Inc. and its popular iPod device and iTunes online music store.”
Full article here.
Let’s hope Sony gets their act together and, if they do decide to concentrate on portable digital music and online music services, that they do them both well as the competition will be good for everyone, including Apple. While Apple is doing a fine job innovating right now, due to lack of competent competition, we’d hate to see them ever start to slip and slide the slope towards complacency (see Microsoft). We hope that a “new” Sony would stop copying of Apple and quit the Windows-only copy-protecting of non-Red Book-compliant CDs for starters, at least.
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