Sony Corp chief executive Nobuyuki Idei is one of Business-Week magazine's worst managers of last year for not being aware in advance of the almost US$1 billion loss posted in the three months ended Jan. 31.
The US-based magazine also cited a fall of profit margin at Sony's electronics business, whose products include the Vaio-series of personal computers. It said the 66-year-old head of the Tokyo-based company "failed to move far enough or fast enough" after Sony restructured in 1999. The profit margin of Sony's electronics products have fallen to about 1 percent from 10 percent a decade ago, the magazine said.
Idei, also the chairman of Sony, is committed to improving the profit margin of the world's No. 2 consumer-electronics maker to 10 percent by the end of March 2007, excluding its financial businesses, by cutting 20,000 jobs and closing some portion of its cathode-ray tube production.
Declining profit margins on the company's consumer electronics can be attributed to the lack of original components in goods such as compact disc players and digital cameras, the magazine said.
Sony's shares declined 25 percent last year, marking a fourth consecutive yearly drop even as the benchmark Nikkei 225 index rose 24 percent. Sony shares have gained 2.1 percent since the company announced the ?111.1 billion (US$1.05 billion) group net loss in April.
The magazine named as other worst managers of the year chief executives Jurgen Schrempp (DaimlerChrysler AG), Wayne Harris (Eckerd Corp), Peter Burg (First-Energy Corp), Joe Galli (Newell Rubbermaid Inc) and Robert Glynn (Pacific Gas & Electric Co).
Among the best managers of the year, the magazine named Yun Jong Yong, chief executive of Samsung Electronics Co, for establishing a strong foothold in the memory-chip industry and for passing Motorola Inc to become the world's second-largest cell-phone maker by value.
Samsung Electronics, which is also the world's second-biggest chipmaker, posted an unexpected gain in third-quarter profit after sales of flat-panel displays and memory chips surged. The company in October forecast record fourth-quarter profit.
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