Sony won’t make same mistakes again
Sony’s chief Howard Stringer said on Wednesday the iconic Japanese company is firmly on the comeback trail and pledged never to repeat the past mistakes of failing to promote new concepts.
Sony, which predicts a sharp rise in profits this year after recent hard times, pioneered the Walkman but watched distraught as US rival Apple later seized the portable-music market with its iPod.
“We have spent the last two years now rebuilding software development strategies,” Stringer said. “We will not make the same mistake again.”
Speaking to some 6,700 shareholders at the firm’s annual meeting in Tokyo, Stringer dismissed criticism of the PlayStation 3, saying that Sony has already shipped 5.5 million consoles since its debut late last year.
“To be fair on PlayStation 3, the pattern of all the PlayStations has been repeated. We always lose money on the hardware initially and we recover that money in great numbers on the software,” Stringer said.
“All the production problems have been solved,” Stringer said. “We are making a comeback already.
“PlayStation 3’s going forward will be vital to our future and we will succeed,” said the Welsh-born Stringer, Sony’s first foreign chief executive.
A research company said this month that Nintendo’s Wii video game console with its innovative motion-sensitive controller outsold the PlayStation 3 by more than five to one in Japan in May.
Sony and Nintendo – along with Microsoft, maker of the Xbox 360 – are locked in fierce competition in the next-generation home game console market.
Sony was forced to delay the global launch of the PS3 by about six months due to problems with its high-definition DVD player and pushed back the rollout again until March in Europe and some other markets.
Sony president Ryoji Chibachi, who co-chaired the annual meeting with Stringer, said Sony management felt “ashamed” to admit Apple’s iPod has taken over its Walkman on the portable music scene.
Stringer said Sony should also admit that “Apple’s relationship with the customer was very strong because of its strong software expertise, which is something we did not do as well as Apple.”
But he said that the Sony-Ericsson mobile phone, which allows music downloads, has been a “great success.”
“We have been working very hard so that when the video Walkman becomes a part of the landscape, we will not suffer as we have done in the audio (segment),” he said.
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