Sony Corp, Japan’s biggest exporter of consumer electronics, plans to look for a new president who could eventually succeed chairman and chief executive officer Howard Stringer, people familiar with the matter said.
Stringer would retain his roles of chairman and CEO, said the people, who asked not to be named because the talks are private. Stringer took on the president’s job in April last year after ousting Ryoji Chubachi.
HELP
Installing a president would give Stringer, who turns 69 in February, a deputy to lighten his work and travel load and offer the designee a chance to prove their mettle as Sony sets its long-term plans.
Kazuo Hirai and Hiroshi Yoshioka, two of the company’s so-called Four Musketeers, may be considered, one of the people said.
Tokyo-based spokesman Shiro Kambe declined to comment.
The choice of the next president may herald a new emphasis on electronics after a decades-long expansion into media. Sony has been unable to loosen Apple Inc’s grip on portable media players or fend off Samsung Electronics Co’s rise in televisions, while Nintendo Co took the lead in video-game consoles.
Since Stringer took over in June 2005, Sony’s stock has fallen about 25 percent, double the drop by Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 Stock Average. The shares rose 0.8 percent to ¥2,894 in Tokyo yesterday.
Stringer replaced division leaders to spur cooperation and cut 30,000 jobs to revive earnings. Sony has been trying to boost sales by promoting 3D products and being first in offering Internet-oriented TVs that run on Google Inc software and Intel Corp chips.
The company raised its full-year net income forecast last month after improved results in the unit that handles PlayStation consoles, Vaio computers and Walkman media players. Sony has posted two consecutive profitable quarters, even as the yen strengthened to near a 15-year high.
PROSPECTS
Since last year, Stringer has been grooming four executives as he pushes Sony’s divisions to marry hardware products with film, TV, game titles and music from the company’s entertainment businesses. With the exception of Hirai, Sony’s “musketeers” are all engineers by trade.
Hirai, 49, who spearheads Sony’s games business, and Yoshioka, who’s in charge of TVs, cameras and chips, are the leading internal contenders for the president’s role, the sources said.
Hirai started his career at a joint venture between Sony and CBS, now called Sony Music Entertainment Inc, in 1984. He was named president of Sony’s US game unit in 1999. The executive, fluent in Japanese and English, was brought up in the US and Japan.
Yoshioka, the oldest of the “musketeers” at 58, oversees a US$50 billion consumer products group that includes TVs, stereos, DVD and Blu-ray players and camcorders. His group also handles batteries and semiconductors.
Yoshihisa Ishida, 51, who spent most of his career at Sony developing and marketing Vaio personal computers, now heads the TV business within Yoshioka’s group. Kunimasa Suzuki, 50, leads Sony’s Vaio personal computer operation under Hirai’s networking products group.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six