“Investors have put Sony’s bosses under pressure to do something about the company’s chronically poor performance,” The Economist reports. “It has lost money in five of the past six years and is forecasting a further loss in the year to March 2015.”
“Vaio is the most significant business Sony has quit in recent times. Cutting it adrift may be the start of a far-reaching reorganisation,” The Economist reports. “On the same day the firm shifted its loss-making televisions arm, once the core of its profits and brand image, into a separate legal entity. For now, Sony’s chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, rules out an outright sale, and many people criticise him for not acting more drastically. Yet the firm admits that an alliance with another television-maker could be an option.”
“After years of denial that surgery was needed, optimism is rising that Japan’s consumer-electronics firms are facing up to their steady loss of global market share. In 1982 we published a briefing on how ‘The giants in Japanese electronics’ were set to keep conquering the world with all manner of exciting new gadgets: Video cameras! Fax machines! CD players! And they did, for a while,” The Economist reports. “But now they all struggle to compete in the most important categories of consumer electronics against rivals such as Samsung of South Korea and especially Apple of the United States.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “David G.” for the heads up.]