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In the biggest management upheaval in Sony Corp.'s 59-year history, Chairman and Chief Executive Nobuyuki Idei resigned after a series of stumbles and handed the reins to Welsh-born American Howard Stringer, a former television executive who heads Sony's U.S. operations.
The move represents a recognition that Sony badly needs to change as it navigates a transformation in its core consumer-electronics business. The company that invented the Walkman and dominated the videogame market with its PlayStation machine has increasingly lagged behind in the Internet era. Nimbler rivals have beaten Sony to market with new products such as flat-panel television sets. The rapid rise of Apple Computer Inc.'s iPod digital music player has given Sony fits.
Mr. Stringer hopes to revive Sony's dream of marrying cutting-edge electronics with entertainment content. At an emergency meeting in Tokyo this morning, Sony's board approved the transfer of power, making Mr. Stringer one of only a handful of foreigners ever to lead a top Japanese company. The board also approved the resignation of Mr. Idei's second-in-command, President Kunitake Ando, who will be succeeded by Executive Deputy President Ryoji Chubachi.
The naming of a foreigner recalls Nissan Motor Corp.'s appointment of Brazilian-born Carlos Ghosn in April 1999. Mr. Ghosn, who is also on Sony's board, is credited with bringing the auto maker back from the brink of bankruptcy, slashing costs while reviving its model lineup.
Sony's choice is unorthodox for reasons beyond the fact that Mr. Stringer isn't Japanese and doesn't speak the language. The gregarious Mr. Stringer, once Dan Rather's producer at CBS News, has no engineering background -- a significant challenge at a company that still relies mainly on hardware such as television sets and music players for most of its sales. Although Mr. Stringer runs Sony's U.S. operations out of New York, he has been spending more time recently in England, where his wife and children live.
Mr. Stringer's biggest challenge will be to revive Sony's electronics business, which last quarter accounted for around 70% of revenue but only 36% of its $1.32 billion in operating income.
The 63-year-old Mr. Stringer has made his name at Sony by leading a turnaround of its U.S. entertainment operations. A decade ago, Sony recorded a humbling $3.2 billion write-down related to its Hollywood movie studio, which it bought in 1988. Under Mr. Stringer, Sony has streamlined its movie and music businesses, slashing hundreds of jobs. And Sony Pictures Entertainment has delivered global hits including its "Spider-Man" franchise. During the October-December quarter, Sony's movie business recorded operating profit of $178 million, or 13% of Sony's total.
Mr. Stringer has convinced his bosses in Tokyo to bulk up on content. Sony last year led an investor group that has agreed to acquire Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc., giving the company access to thousands more movie titles that it hopes to exploit on DVD. Also, Sony Music Entertainment has merged with Bertelsmann AG's BMG.
But Sony's 15-year quest for synergy between hardware and software remains largely unconsummated -- as symbolized by its failure to take the lead in digital-music players, which should have been an ideal arena for Sony to combine its electronics expertise with its ownership of entertainment content. Apple has succeeded not only with the iPod but also with its iTunes online service, the top way to download songs legally over the Internet. Sony's own online music service, Sony Connect, has attracted few shoppers so far.
Much of the criticism for these failures has been directed at Mr. Idei, 67, who has fought to increase the importance of entertainment and content in his decade at Sony's helm. Insiders say he has been searching for a way to shake up the company and instill a greater sense of urgency. Putting Mr. Stringer in the top post is the ultimate step in Sony's quest to bring together its media and hardware businesses.
As is typical at Japanese companies, Mr. Idei was given considerable leeway in choosing his own successor, and the naming of Mr. Stringer was Mr. Idei's idea, said a person familiar with the plan. Mr. Idei and his No. 2, Mr. Ando, will stay on at Sony as advisers.
In a written comment, Mr. Stringer said he hoped to use his experience in turning around the U.S. operations to help boost profitability group-wide. "I believe the entire global organization is hungry to make this same transition" to better returns, he said in a written comment. Mr Idei praised Mr. Stringer's "global perspective" and said the new management will "focus intensely on energizing the entire Sony Group."
Mr. Stringer has built strong relationships with Sony's top brass in Tokyo. Unlike some other Sony executives in the U.S., who steer clear of visiting Japan as much as possible, Mr. Stringer has put in regular visits to company headquarters. He is not expected to move to Tokyo but rather "live on a plane," as one insider put it. Sony said Mr. Stringer will be based in New York and Tokyo.
One goal of elevating Mr. Stringer is to emphasize that Sony is a sprawling global business that needs global leadership. Bringing in a non-Japanese chief executive will likely be a shock to a company that is still controlled on the whole by Japanese executives in Tokyo. Mr. Stringer's background as a media executive at CBS is another jolt to a company that prides itself on its engineering tradition going back to the development of the transistor radio in the 1950s.
The choice of Mr. Chubachi as president is designed to make up for Mr. Stringer's lack of experience with hardware. Mr. Chubachi, a career Sony engineer, is now in charge of the business division that makes batteries, optical pickups and other key devices that go into Sony products.
In elevating Messrs. Stringer and Chubachi, Sony is bypassing the man often cited as its top visionary: Ken Kutaragi, an executive deputy president who created Sony's PlayStation videogame business and is now in charge of home electronics. Although PlayStation is one of Sony's most successful and profitable businesses, Mr. Kutaragi hasn't yet had a big success outside of videogames. One of his flagship consumer-electronics products -- a hybrid DVD recorder and game console called the PSX -- has not sold well in Japan. He has been immersed in a project to build a new ultrapowerful processing chip slated for use in the next-generation PlayStation machine and other devices.
Mr. Kutaragi will lose his executive deputy president title after April 1 and be moved back to focusing on videogames, Sony said. His post as executive overseeing home electronics as well as the semiconductor business will be taken over by Mr. Chubachi. Mr. Kutaragi couldn't immediately be reached for comment.
Mr. Idei, a marketing whiz, was appointed to Sony's top post in 1995. Until then, Sony had been led by engineers and hardware men, including founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka. Mr. Idei's first task was to better integrate the movie and music operations Sony had bought in the late 1980s. He hired Mr. Stringer and brought the entertainment businesses back in control after a period under free-spending American executives.
Mr. Idei also presided over the successful launch of the Vaio personal computer, and later named the executive in charge of that business, Mr. Ando, to the president's post.
But Mr. Idei struggled to impose his will. He proposed to sell Sony's life-insurance company to a foreign buyer, only to have the deal torpedoed by fierce resistance from inside the company, Sony managers say. And some engineers say that under Mr. Idei's leadership, too many of Sony's resources were plowed into content and service development and not enough into development of key hardware devices and technologies. Sony has fallen behind other Asian makers in the fast-growing area of flat-panel television sets. Its efforts to make a competitor to Apple's iPod have been plagued by internal conflict over which division should lead the effort.
The stresses on Sony's executive suite grew in April 2003, when the company slashed its profit outlook and said it had serious problems in its electronics business. That sent its shares into a tailspin. In the months following the so-called Sony Shock, Mr. Idei came up with a turnaround plan that called for drastic restructuring, bold new products and 10% in operating-profit margins by March 2007. He put Mr. Kutaragi in charge of home electronics and invested heavily in the new processing chip for the next-generation PlayStation. As part of the overhaul, thousands of Japanese staffers opted for early retirement.
Nearly two years later, electronics profits are still weak and the constant organizational shuffles have pummeled morale, Sony insiders say. After a disappointing Christmas quarter, during which nearly all of Sony's key products saw profits decline amid cutthroat price-cutting, Sony expects an operating-profit margin of only 1.5% in the fiscal year ending March 31. That puts Sony far from its targeted 10% in 2007 and well behind peers such as Samsung Electronics Co. or even long-troubled Japanese rival Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the maker of Panasonic products, which has revived in recent years and is expecting a margin of around 3.5%.
Sony managers complain that Messrs. Idei and Ando haven't been able to steer feuding camps of engineers or implement a vision for the company.
That is exactly what Sony is looking to Mr. Stringer for. When Mr. Stringer was first hired to head Sony Corp. of America in 1997, it was reeling from a series of disasters in its entertainment business that left Tokyo management highly skeptical about American executives.
Sony's Los Angeles-based Columbia Pictures division was still rocking from huge losses under the management of Peter Guber and Jon Peters, whose lavish spending on private chefs and other frills made Sony the laughingstock of Hollywood. The head of the New York-based music unit, Thomas D. Mottola, refused to attend meetings with his Japanese bosses in Tokyo. Mr. Stringer's nonconfrontational style and British charm were part of his appeal.
Mr. Stringer, a former TV reporter who became a U.S. citizen in 1985, spent nearly three decades at CBS News, first as a producer and eventually as head of its news, sports and entertainment divisions. During that time he developed a reputation for collaborating equally well with Hollywood talent and corporate management. Knighted by the British monarchy in 2000, he has broken bread with Prince Charles and in 1993 scored a coup for CBS by luring late-night comedian David Letterman from his longtime home at NBC.
When Mr. Idei contacted him, Mr. Stringer was leading a struggling interactive-TV venture and looking for a new job. Mr. Idei, however, played his cards close to his chest. Through a sweltering lunch -- the restaurant's air-conditioner was on the blink -- Mr. Idei chatted blandly about the broadcast and movie industries, at times lapsing into long silences. He didn't mention a job once. "I had no idea how the lunch went," Mr. Stringer recalled in a recent interview.
Mr. Stringer responded to the vagueness with a tolerance and patience that was to become a hallmark of his dealings with Sony's Japanese executives. Some months later, when Mr. Idei flew Mr. Stringer to Tokyo for dinner at a sushi restaurant with live shrimp leaping on a hot plate, Mr. Stringer recalled that Mr. Idei handed him a piece of paper with a few responsibilities listed on it and a salary figure lower than he had made in 15 years. Mr. Stringer took the job, despite the warnings of his friends. At his inaugural news conference, he claimed to be "fine" with Mr. Idei's comparison of his job to that of a computer operating system, since it's "difficult to define" what an operating system does.
Even after taking over Sony's U.S. operations, Mr. Stringer was given little to do by Mr. Idei, who was still wary of American executives. "I kept saying to him: 'You hired me but you haven't given me any responsibility,' " recalled Mr. Stringer in a recent interview. "I had had a real job...and now I was in charge of a bunch of movie theaters and a Metreon [shopping mall] that wasn't making any money," Mr. Stringer said.
Mr. Stringer began the slow process of wooing Sony brass. He traveled to Tokyo every month, making sure to have dinner with Japanese executives each time. He tried to learn Japanese -- until he realized most Sony executives spoke pretty good English.
Attempting to bond with Mr. Idei, Mr. Stringer invited him to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and Herbert Allen's exclusive media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. He invited Mr. Idei to a dinner party at his Manhattan townhouse, flanking him with TV anchor Barbara Walters, director Nora Ephron and New York gossip columnist Liz Smith.
Then Mr. Idei started giving Mr. Stringer some real responsibility: first Sony Canada, then Sony Electronics U.S. In December 1998, he was given oversight over the pictures and music business as well. Once in charge, Mr. Stringer moved to put his own people and strategies in place.
One of Mr. Stringer's first jobs was to get the entertainment assets in shape as stand-alone businesses. Among his key hires during that time, Mr. Stringer hired former Credit Suisse First Boston banker Rob Wiesenthal in 2000 as chief strategy officer. In 2003, Mr. Stringer then turned to an executive with no music experience, former NBC President Andrew Lack, to run Sony Music. Later, he installed an executive with limited movie experience, Michael Lynton, to oversee the studio.
On the movie side, the "Spider-Man" franchise went a long way toward soothing Tokyo's nerves over the entertainment business, spinning out billions of dollars of cash through movies, merchandise and other avenues. Still, some in Tokyo were having a hard time coming to terms with the newfound success of the entertainment business.
Before an analyst meeting in Tokyo in 2003, Mr. Stringer suggested to other Sony executives that Sony begin by touting the success of "Spider-Man." He was bluntly told that Japanese investors didn't care about the entertainment business. But Mr. Idei was sympathetic to the idea, and when Sony met analysts in New York he started by holding up a magazine with "Spider-Man" on the cover.
As the entertainment business stabilized, Messrs. Stringer and Wiesenthal plunged into deal-making mode with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and BMG deals. Nevertheless, Mr. Stringer got another rude awakening about Tokyo's appetite for the entertainment business at last year's annual shareholders meeting. Not a single investor asked a question about the movie or music business. Sensing Mr. Stringer's frustration, Mr. Idei asked him to say something. "It's a long way to come for five hours without answering a single question," Mr. Stringer told the shareholders. "Nobody buys a piece of hardware because they like hardware. They buy it to play movies or music content."
Sony is not expected to seek a replacement for Mr. Stringer in his role as head of Sony Corp. of America, say people close to the company.
Long an advocate for the convergence strategy that Sony initially envisaged, Mr. Stringer said in a recent interview he believes Sony's expanded entertainment assets "are at a level that gives us comfort to develop synergies more efficiently." He added: "The next level is to prepare for the truly digital revolution. We've got to get the relationship between content and devices seamlessly managed."
Und hier die neuste News:
Sony's surprise decision to replace Nobuyuki Idei with Howard Stringer as chief executive has prompted investment bankers and rivals to consider a takeover of the world's second-largest consumer electronics group.
"Incredible though this may seem, these events put Sony in play. I am sure there will be plenty of people considering this over the next few days," said a senior Hong Kong-based investment banker yesterday.
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