New Sony CEO Stringer's expertise is confined to the two little grey boxes (see second figure below) labeled "movies and television" and "music".
Times: Samsung has become what Sony could once claim - the competitor with both the breadth of products and the appeal of a premium brand.
This rapid reversal of fortunes illustrates the highly competitive world of consumer electronics that Sir Howard, a media man, is entering. Complacency and coasting on best-selling products have contributed to a nearly 75 percent decline in Sony's stock value since its March 1, 2000, peak. The invincible "factory of ideas" founded almost six decades ago by Akio Morita, the company that brought the world the transistor radio, the Walkman and the Trinitron television tube, seems to have lost its way.
"Samsung is now the anti-Sony," George Gilder, an American technology analyst, said here Wednesday. "Sony is layered with bureaucracy. The amazing thing about Samsung is that it is like Apple with Steve Jobs involved in designing the iPod, it is like Sony with Morita deeply involved in developing products."
Samsung has kept a lean corporate structure, with authority increasingly delegated to front-line managers around the world, and almost a quarter of the far-flung staff of 88,000 dedicated to research and development.
But in Monday's boardroom purge, Sony demoted the one engineer credited with developing a new, world-beating product line, the PlayStation game consoles. Ken Kutaragi remains chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment, but he loses supervision of Sony's consumer electronics and semiconductor business just as it is preparing the Cell Chip, a superchip that is to run the next generation of game machines and also high-definition televisions. With the hand-held PlayStation Portable selling like hotcakes since it was released here in December, the next PlayStation is to come out next year, in time to compete with a new Xbox console by the Microsoft Corporation and a new console by Nintendo.
"I meet many Sony employees here who are so gloomy," Takeshi Oyabu, an assistant professor of Keio Business School, said in an interview here. "Without me saying anything, they say things like 'I am from Sony whose reputation is very bad.' "
6 comments:
Hi hi. Blogger is really having problems. Much of the time the comments page will not open. Nice Google. Nice...
Anne
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/10/business/worldbusiness/10textile.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Free of Quota, China Textiles Flood the U.S.
By DAVID BARBOZA and ELIZABETH BECKER
SHANGHAI - In the first month after the end of all quotas on textiles and apparel around the world, imports to the United States from China jumped about 75 percent, according to trade figures released by the Chinese government.
The statistics bear some of the first evidence that China's booming textile and apparel trade, unhampered by quotas, could be prepared to dominate the global textile trade and add to trade tensions around the world. The quotas came to an end on Dec. 31 as a result of an international agreement reached in 1993.
In January, the United States imported more than $1.2 billion in textiles and apparel from China, up from about $701 million a year ago. Imports of major apparel products from China jumped 546 percent. Last January, for example, China shipped 941,000 cotton knit shirts, which were limited by quotas; this January, it shipped 18.2 million, a 1,836 percent increase. Imports of cotton knit trousers were up 1,332 percent from a year ago.
These figures may be understated because China ships a large part of its goods through Hong Kong, and those shipments are not included.
Fears that China is going to flood the world market with cheap textile exports have already inflamed tensions between Washington and Beijing because of worries about American manufacturing plants being closed and thousands of jobs being lost.
Already, in January, the first month after global quotas were lifted, 12,200 jobs were lost in the United States apparel and textile industries, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Some analysts have predicted that China could capture as much as 70 percent of the American market in the next two years. Before the end of quotas, about 16 percent of apparel sold in the United States came from China....
Anne
When I found the Times article on Samsung and Sony, I thought of Steve :)
Anne
It's premature to lock Stringer in such tight boxes. The question is if SONY screwed it up on strategy, execution, engineering, etc. Or, in other words, which one of these directions (if any) should SONY work hard upon to get back on its feet?
Than, according to the answer, one has to figure out if Stringer fits the requirements...
fCh http://chircu.com
up with sony down with samsung...
samsung owns
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