Sony Picks Game Chief As President
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TOKYO -- Sony on Wednesday picked Kazuo Hirai, a video game executive who led a turnaround of its PlayStation business, as its next president and chief executive, in a bid to regain some of its magic.
Mr. Hirai, 51, Sony's chief of consumer electronics and games, had been widely expected to succeed Howard Stringer, who has led Sony as chief executive since 2005. Mr. Stringer, an American born in Wales and one of just a handful of foreign chief executives at large Japanese companies, will become chairman of the board on April 1, Sony said in a statement. Mr. Stringer already is Sony chairman, an executive position. He will move to a board seat that is not an executive post.
Mr. Hirai -- who was chosen in a rare unanimous vote of the board -- takes the helm of a company that has struggled to reverse a long slide. Once the envy of the technology industry, Sony, which is based in Tokyo, has fallen behind nimbler rivals in recent years.
The maker of the Walkman music player in the 1970s, Sony could not translate that success to the digital area and now trails Apple in portable music players and smartphones. Once a pioneer in television technology, Sony has been muscled out of that market by its South Korean rivals Samsung and LG.
Mr. Stringer's drive to cut costs and streamline Sony's sprawling operations briefly appeared to gain traction in the mid-2000s. Mr. Stringer, who is 69 and joined Sony's American unit from CBS in 1997, has also tried -- with varying degrees of success -- to better integrate the company's hardware business with its vast catalog of music, movies and video games. The popular PlayStation Network, which offers downloads of games, movies and television shows, has nearly 100 million subscribers.
But the global economic crisis, which caused a collapse in Japanese exports and a severe recession in Japan, stopped any meaningful Sony comeback. The earthquake and tsunami last March disrupted production at 10 Sony plants in northern Japan and severed vital supply chains; flooding in Thailand, the manufacturing hub, has also curtailed production.
An older issue, the stubbornly strong yen, continues to hurt Sony's competitiveness overseas. Further clouding the outlook was an embarrassing hacker attack on its PlayStation network, which required it to shut down for about two months beginning last April and led to a breach of personal data from tens of millions of user accounts.
First Published February 2, 2012 12:00 am
