Sony (NYSE: SNE) CEO Sir Howard Stringer spends his time jet setting among his offices and homes in Tokyo, New York, and his native Wales. Sony has lost money two years in a row as he has made his rounds from place to place. Today, the company disclosed that he made $8.8 million last year for his unsuccessful labors.
Sony has not only lost money, it has lost its way. Once the “Apple” of consumer electronics, is had immensely successful franchises like the PS3 and Walkman. It does not have an iconic consumer device any more and its PS3 is usually hammered in monthly sales by the Microsoft (NASDAQ MSFT) Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii.Stringer has made a number of strategic mistakes and will continue to pay for them. For instance, he failed to cement the company’s position in the highly profitable game console business. Sony’s consumer electronics business — PCs, television screens, and digital cameras — also is facing larger and often lower cost producers.
Sony has also inexplicably held its movie studio business. That may have made some odd sense when the media business expected to bundle content with devices. That business plan is a decade old and never worked. It has been replaced by Internet-based platforms such as Hulu which are agnostic about who provides them content as long as the financial terms are right.
Stringer will be damned as a CEO most of all for allowing Sony to be eclipsed by Apple and other companies. Sony was the single brand most associated with revolutionary consumer electronics devices. That place, which it held during the 1970s and 1980s, has passed to other companies. Stringer was promoted to bring those days back and has not had even the most modest success in doing so.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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