SI: Stringer At Sony Shareholders Meeting: ?My Role Is To Recover The Business?

[Christopher]

Sony, fresh from forecasting first back-to-back annual losses in half a century, is making “steady progress” in cutting costs, Chief Executive Officer Howard Stringer said recently in front of thousands at the 92nd Shareholders Meeting in Tokyo. The company is eliminating 16,000 jobs, shutting factories and reducing the number of suppliers to cope with the global recession. Sony last month forecast it would post a second straight annual loss for the first time since its 1958 listing. The meeting essentially allowed shareholders to give final approval regarding some new additions to the board of directors, and give Stringer even more power as President.

“My role is to recover the business,” Stringer, 67, told shareholders today at their annual meeting in Tokyo.

Sony aims to marry “brilliant hardware engineers” with “equally strong software,” said Stringer, who’s chairman and chief executive. He wants to avoid losing out to rivals’ products with better, more advanced functions, as Apple achieved with its iPod music player and Amazon did with its Kindle book reader, he said. Stringer, who joined Sony in 1997 and became CEO in 2005, replaced Ryoji Chubachi as president on April 1. The company announced the move in February and said at the time it will combine Vaio computers, Walkman music players and games under Kazuo Hirai, who would focus on creating gadgets that work with each other and connect to the Internet.

“We are not going to be beaten again in the network age,” Stringer said today. “This is our challenge and our opportunity and this is why we made the structural change. We have not finished, we have a long way to go.”

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