Sony’s painful restructuring drive is progressing well but reform efforts are still at an early stage, the group’s president said in an interview published on Wednesday.
“I think we’ve made sizable progress in regaining confidence and improving earnings but in my mind, our reform is still in its early stages,” Ryoji Chubachi told the Nihon Keizai business newspaper.
“Earnings have improved beyond projections thanks to factors such as the success of our new liquid crystal display (LCD) television brand, which was launched in time for the year-end sales season,” he was quoted as saying.
Sony, struggling to compete with rival products such as Apple’s phenomenally successful iPod MP3 player, announced last September a major overhaul including 10 000 job cuts by March 2008.
The inventor of the Walkman, which last year put in the driver’s seat Howard Stringer, a Welsh-born former television journalist, in January posted a record profit for the three months to December in a sign of a possible turnaround.
It no longer expects a loss of ¥10-billion for the year to March 2006 but a net profit of ¥70-billion.
Sony said in January that it will have cut 4 500 employees and closed down seven plants by the end of March.
Chubachi said in the interview that Sony had carried out its structural reforms for this fiscal year on or ahead of time.
“I think we can also achieve our reform goals for fiscal 2006 and 2007 more or less ahead of schedule,” he added.
He said Sony would need to make large investments in production of hot-selling flat-panel televisions.
These TVs are one of the fastest-growing electronics markets in Japan as consumers dump their bulky old sets and splurge on flat screens as the economy crawls out of a slump stretching back over a decade.
“We’ll also beef up our software development capability because software is essential for operating digital consumer electronics. We are now far short of the software engineers we need,” Chubachi said. – AFP