Sony back among tech’s leading lights
ONCE upon a time, Sony was Apple. For decades, the Japanese consumer electronics giant was known for its innovation as much as Apple is today. It commercialised the transistor radio with the TR-63 and popularised the console gaming market with the PlayStation.
It pioneered the compact disc (with Philips) and invented Blu-ray. Heck, it single-handedly created the portable music device market with the Walkman, two decades before Steve Jobs reinvented it for the digital age with Apple’s iPod.
Sony was known for quality, which allowed it to maintain healthy margins. Demand for the company’s products underpinned Japan’s export-led economic boom between the 1960s and 1980s.
But Sony squandered its lead — and markets such as digital music players that it should have dominated. Business magazines have featured countless cover stories on what went wrong.
Sales numbers and forecasts suggest strong recovery in core areas
For years now, Sony has reported brutal financial losses as it failed to come up with compelling new products.
Quietly, however, under the leadership of Sony’s new CEO, Kazuo Hirai — he took the reins from Briton Howard Stringer in April 2012 — the company has begun churning out one head-turning product after another. From cellphones and laptops to tablets and consoles, Sony appears to have rediscovered its winning formula of old. Sales numbers and forecasts suggest a strong recovery in core areas such as televisions, where it has struggled in a cut-throat market, and smartphones.
Last week, Sony reported its first full-year profit in four years. Net income for 2013 was ¥43-billion (about R4.4-billion), from a loss of ¥457-billion a year ago. Since the beginning of the year, Sony’s share price has almost doubled.
The first in a string of new products that has begun to pique consumers’ interest again is its new Xperia Z smartphone. The company has not had a smash-hit smartphone product in years — its now ended alliance with Sweden’s Ericsson never really went anywhere. But the Xperia Z has won rave reviews around the world for its ruggedised, waterproof, super-thin and stylish design. Sony has a long way to go if it is going to beat Samsung’s momentum with the Galaxy range, but the Xperia Z is right up there and competing with the best in smartphones right now.
Another product that has people talking is Sony’s incredibly slim and lightweight Xperia Z tablet. Some reviewers say it is the first Androidpowered tablet that poses a real threat to Apple’s dominance with the iPad. It runs rings around most of the non-Apple competition.
And the hits keep on coming. In notebooks, where Sony has long had a reputation for building lightweight and ultra-portable machines, it has outdone itself with its new Vaio laptops — the Duo and Pro models.
For years, anyone looking for an ultra-portable computer would have been hard-pressed not to give serious consideration to the MacBook Air over just about anything else. PC manufacturers struggled to develop compelling Windows-based alternatives to the Apple line-up. That is finally starting to change and Sony is leading the charge with its new Vaios.
Of course, the company faces a number of strong competitors in all the markets in which it competes: Samsung in television, Apple and Samsung in smartphones and Microsoft in gaming consoles. Although Sony won a crucial public relations battle with Microsoft recently when both companies announced their next-generation gaming consoles — the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One — it is far from clear who will win the war in the long term.
After just 15 months at the helm, it appears that Sony’s new boss has found the key to the technology wizardry that made the company such a formidable competitor in consumer electronics for so many years. Sony, it seems, has rediscovered its mojo. Hip hip Hirai.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral.co.za; follow him on Twitter at @mcleodd