In April this year, Sony's current CEO Hirai Kazuhide will helm Sony this heavy baton to his successor, as Sony's chief strategy officer and chief financial officer Yoshida Kenichiro, the latter has assisted Hirai husband Fu together Sony Electronics And entertainment group giant wheel saved from deep trouble, but in the future he must lead Sony and Google, Samsung giant competition.
In April 2012, after losing money for four years in a row and having experienced the worst financial loss in his history, Hirai took over the power of Sony, bringing Sony back to the cloud and taming Sony on Apple's iPhone Under the leadership of Hirai and husband, Sony handed in a beautiful transcript and achieved the best profit in the history while Kenichiro Yoshihiro made efforts in this field as a leading technology pioneer to bring mobile entertainment to the world. Played a crucial role.
Hirai Fu found himself in trouble the following year as Sony's president and CEO, after Sony realized its first profit in five years by selling assets, including real estate and equities, but a deeper restructuring In particular, the serious restructuring of the television business, which has suffered serious losses, has lagged behind and Sony is in danger of being caught in a financial deficit again.
At that time, Hirai Fu discovered the ability of Kenichiro Yoshida, who was in charge of the network services business So-net at that time, and Kenichiro Yoshida, reporting the performance of the So-net unit to Hirai Hifu every month, discussed the overall strategy of Sony, Yoshida will impress Hirai husband with his reform philosophy.
Kazuhiro Hirai and Kenichiro Yoshida (Image from Nikkei Shimbun)
In the fall of 2013, Hirai Yohei, a hotel in the hot spring resort town of Hakone, announced a shock that led to a house of Sony executives: Kenichiro Yoshida will succeed Sony Chief Strategy Officer in December that year, Strategist Saito was crowding out of office, and with the personnel adjustment and Kenichiro Yoshida's appointment as chief financial officer in the spring of next year, Sony embarked on his journey of revival.
Hirai told his new chief strategy officer that Sony could no longer postpone its own resolution, and details Kenji Yoshida drafted the plan and Hirai made the decision, and Sony quickly began restructuring its unprofitable business.
At that time, Sony TV business was at a loss, sales cut to only 10 million units.Three years later, Sony TV business to achieve a turnaround.In addition, Sony is also in Vaio notebook business in 2014 sold to the investment fund Japanese industry partners, and Which sold the battery business to Tokyo electronics maker Murata in 2017. Also in 2014, Sony and another Japanese consumer electronics company Panasonic parted its OLED panel production business and injected it into a new company, JOLED.
As early as 20 years ago, Hirai Fu was temporarily assigned to Sony USA's video game unit, showed the ability to face problems. For the first time removed from the music department, is not the result of Hirai's desire, but in order to win the trust of new colleagues , He asked for a move to the gaming department, where he started from scratch and built Sony's PlayStation gaming business in the U.S. Finally, Hirai became the head of the Sony video game unit.
As Sony CEO, Hirai efforts to instill a more realistic view of the company, this view is different from some people still stick to the legendary point of view, the most obvious manifestation of this Sony decided in the autumn of 2014 to suspend the shareholders Which is the first time Sony has gone public, even in fiscal 2011 (as of March 2012) of a huge loss of 450 billion yen (US $ 4.14 billion at the exchange rate prevailing at the time) (as of March 2012), Sony insisted to shareholders Dividends, but for Sony, it is an irresponsible bluff.
Sony's past leaders are known for their charisma, including the founder of Sony, Shinya Inoue and Akio Morita, as well as the second-generation chief executive, Daichi Hodakasu, the early promoter of the compact disc, and later Shinichi Idei. Nobuyuki Idei, who was appointed president of Sony, had long recognized the importance of the Internet and claimed that Sony's mission was to create products and services for consumers whom he described as "digital dream kids." But such attempts sometimes Just counterproductive, because the result is less than expected, Sony suffered shares fell.
When Hirai Fuh received the CEO's death from his predecessor, Howard Stringer, the over-expansion Sony has fallen to the bottom. The only way to get out of the woods is to downscale Sony to a manageable scale and make a profit Business to 'stop bleeding'.
While entrusting Kenichiro Yoshida to restructure the company, Hirai further deepened ties with key players in technology leaders, including Apple and video streaming service Netflix, and in no way did he elevate Sony's image Victory.
The cornerstone of Hirai's effort to reform is a business model that emphasizes continuous sales instead of one-time hardware sales - such as through registration of user-updated software or services - and the prototype of this business model is what he helped build PlayStation business in the PlayStation's history, its global sales have reached 400 million cumulative.
But over the past six years as Sony has returned to fighting, platform-based companies like Google and Amazon have become technology giants, with South Korea's electronics maker Samsung Electronics almost 8 times the operating profit of Sony Corp. To challenge these giants, Sony is now Only to stand on the starting line.To Kenichiro Hirai's successor, in front of him a long way to go, first of all, he needs to develop a post-PlayStation era development plan.