Sony Corp hired Andrew Lack to run its music unit, choosing an executive with more than two decades of experience in television news to replace Thomas Mottola, who resigned yesterday.
Lack, 55, has been president and chief operating officer of General Electric Co's NBC television unit since 2001 and previously ran NBC News for eight years. Before that he was a producer at CBS News, where he worked for former CBS executive Howard Stringer, now chief executive of Sony Corp of America.
Lack must find a new strategy for Sony Music, analysts said, as unauthorized swapping of music over the Internet cuts into its sales. He comes from outside the music business to replace Mottola, who brought acts such as Jennifer Lopez and the Dixie Chicks to Sony.
Lack "doesn't have a music industry background," said David Kathman, an analyst at Morningstar Inc. "Maybe that's what Sony is going for, because the music industry is changing so rapidly. The young people that they're trying to reach are downloading the music for free. It's really a problem they have to address."
Mottola worked for Sony Music for 14 years and previously managed artists such as Hall & Oates, Carly Simon and John Mellencamp. He said yesterday he plans to start his own record label in partnership with Sony.
The American depositary receipts of Tokyo-based Sony fell US$0.43 to US$42.88 at 4pm in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The ADRs, each representing one ordinary share, have fallen 9.8 percent over the past year. General Electric shares fell US$0.25 to US$25.65.
While sales at Sony's music business, which accounts for a tenth of the company's overall revenue, rose 4.8 percent in the 12 months ended March 2002, operating profit fell 1.6 percent.
US compact-disc sales declined 8.8 percent last year, the second consecutive year that album sales fell, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks US retail sales of music.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts