Sony today announced that Kazuo Hirai has taken over the role of president and CEO of the company, while current president Sir Howard Stringer will become the Chairman of the board of directors.
Sony has now confirmed that his new role will be effective as of April 1, 2012, while Stringer will take his position as Chairman in June. Current Chairman Yotaro Kobayashi will then retire.
Hirai was instrumental in the early marketing success of Sony's then-new PlayStation video game brand in the mid-1990s. He worked his way up the ladder and eventually replaced division CEO Ken Kutaragi, who retired in 2007.
Stringer commented, "Kaz is a globally focused executive for whom technology and the cloud are familiar territory, content is highly valued, and digital transformation is second nature. I believe his tough-mindedness and leadership skills will be of great benefit to the company and its customers in the months and years ahead."
Hirai added, "As challenging as times are for Sony now, were it not for the strong leadership of Sir Howard Stringer these past seven years, we would have been in a much more difficult position."
"The path we must take is clear: to drive the growth of our core electronics businesses - primarily digital imaging, smart mobile and game; to turn around the television business; and to accelerate the innovation that enables us to create new business domains."
Good to see that Music, Film, and the 3000 other industries that Sony is in aren't at the forefront of Hirai's agenda. I don't have much confidence though that he will be any-more effective than Stringer and I worry that as a lifetime Sony employee, he will have that disastrous Sony arrogance.
Nonetheless, I wish him luck as Sony has been good to its employees, well those not living in China anyway. But making their TV/smartphone businesses profitable is going to be quite the feat given that Sony has to compete with Korea's Chaebols and California's Apple.
Sony is a good company with too may products. Many that go unnoticed by the average consumer. He should try and convince Sony to move in a direction that makes them lean and directional with their hardware. They should cut some of the fat and focus on the core values of their business.
With all the devices they make (including game systems, computers,mobile phones, TVs and audio systems) all that stuff needs to work well together .
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I remember reading that one of Sony's greatest weaknesses by the time Stringer came on board was that it was too divided , compartmentalized and contentious between its departments. That wasn't working anymore then and its sure not going to work now with platforms and "harmonious ecosystems" becoming a major selling point and differentiation factor.
Sony has the resources and the assets (including their game developers, music labels and film studios) to put out a very compelling product but they are playing catch-up now...bolder decisions to serve the consumer are needed, pure tech won't win the day anymore.
I think they did try to harmonize their hardware somewhat, but it comes of as a experiment rather than a polished service. For example the PS3 can be used via a VIAO. However they stop so short of realizing that connection that is it hardly useful to anyone that can do it. Now they are promising the cloud as a way to harmonize. Given the track record of such promises, it remains to be seen if they will pull it of this time.
Other companies like Samsung or Mitsubishi are active in at least as many different business fields as Sony and they are extremly profitable, so it's not that the model of a diversive company is per se not working.
What I don't get is that Sony demented via Reuters and Bloomber that Kazuo Hirai will take over on january 7th, shortly after the news came up, with the explanation, that no decision was made yet. Now, 3 weeks later they announce the same thing, who do they want to tell they haven't already have made the decision, when they just denied it?
This doesn't give me the impression of a confident business strategy.
You'd be surprised. Sony is into things like insurance, building management, and a 1001 other non-tech non-manufacturing businesses. But what really killed Sony was the fact that some of the different parts of the business actively hampered other parts, like the music division demanding drm and no mp3 playback, effectively killing the walkman brand. afaik, Samsung etc, while still sprawling and massive, do not have that problem.
"You'd be surprised. Sony is into things like insurance, building management, and a 1001 other non-tech non-manufacturing businesses."
So is Samsung (e.g. insurance, ship building, house building, theme parks, advertising)
I agree, that Sony is having difficulties with the competition between their departments, all I wanted to say was, that it doesn't have to be that way, other companies are doing it better with an even diversive business.
Samsung doesn't own content providers to my knowledge. That's the weird double edged sword Sony has to constantly deal with... They have film studios, music labels, and of course video game developers. The Playstation brand in and of itself is also a wrench in the coherency of their products that Samsung doesn't have to deal with
Why should it be a double edged sword to be a content provider as well? It's a situation, most companies are hoping to achieve and that is often regulated by the authorities, because the company becomes to powerful this way (see the regulation of the movie market in the last century in the US)
Actually it was already leaked last month or so by some Japanese source and many saw this coming. It was just matter of time before it became official.
Personally, from a consumer perspective, I feel Sony's products don't have a unified message. You have your PSP, your Vita, an Xperia, which is a phone, but it plays PSP games, not Vita ones and about a million other products that share no one philosophy, or don't seem to have any design philosophy at all. Sony's products are just all over the map.
Books, too. Sony makes e-readers and has a book store, but you can only read those books on a Sony e-reader. Why not the Vita or PSP? Or even a Sony TV?
This is Sony's big failing - they have all this multimedia content, books, movies, music, games, yet instead of having unified hardware, it's all specialized.
Supposedly Sony was going to try to unify this, but I've seen no real signs of this.
Nonetheless, I wish him luck as Sony has been good to its employees, well those not living in China anyway. But making their TV/smartphone businesses profitable is going to be quite the feat given that Sony has to compete with Korea's Chaebols and California's Apple.
"Why are we making printers if we're not good at it?"
Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I remember reading that one of Sony's greatest weaknesses by the time Stringer came on board was that it was too divided , compartmentalized and contentious between its departments. That wasn't working anymore then and its sure not going to work now with platforms and "harmonious ecosystems" becoming a major selling point and differentiation factor.
Sony has the resources and the assets (including their game developers, music labels and film studios) to put out a very compelling product but they are playing catch-up now...bolder decisions to serve the consumer are needed, pure tech won't win the day anymore.
What I don't get is that Sony demented via Reuters and Bloomber that Kazuo Hirai will take over on january 7th, shortly after the news came up, with the explanation, that no decision was made yet. Now, 3 weeks later they announce the same thing, who do they want to tell they haven't already have made the decision, when they just denied it?
This doesn't give me the impression of a confident business strategy.
So is Samsung (e.g. insurance, ship building, house building, theme parks, advertising)
I agree, that Sony is having difficulties with the competition between their departments, all I wanted to say was, that it doesn't have to be that way, other companies are doing it better with an even diversive business.
This is Sony's big failing - they have all this multimedia content, books, movies, music, games, yet instead of having unified hardware, it's all specialized.
Supposedly Sony was going to try to unify this, but I've seen no real signs of this.