Sony Corporation on Wednesday confirmed the appointment of executive deputy president Kazuo Hirai as CEO and company president, replacing Howard Stringer, who is currently President and CEO. Hirai will assume his new position on April 1st and Stringer will take a new role on the company’s board of directors as its chairman starting in June. ”Kaz is a globally focused executive for whom technology and the cloud are familiar territory, content is highly valued, and digital transformation is second nature,” Stringer said in a statement. “I believe his tough-mindedness and leadership skills will be of great benefit to the company and its customers in the months and years ahead.” Hirai acknowledged that Sony faces serious challenges and he pointed to digital imaging, mobile and gaming as the three key businesses that will carry Sony into the future. The company’s full press release follows below.

Sony names Kazuo Hirai as President and CEO; Sir Howard Stringer to become Chairman of the Board of Directors

TOKYO, Japan – Sony Corporation (“Sony”) today announced that Kazuo Hirai has been appointed as President and Chief Executive Officer, effective April 1, 2012. Sir Howard Stringer, currently Chairman, CEO and President, will become Chairman of the Board of Directors in June, 2012. Mr. Stringer recommended to the Sony Board of Directors that Mr. Hirai, currently Executive Deputy President, be his successor as President and CEO. Mr. Stringer will continue as Chairman of Sony Corporation until his ascension to the Board Chairmanship, which will become effective upon Board approval following the annual meeting of shareholders in June, when the current Chairman, Yotaro Kobayashi, will retire. Mr. Hirai is also expected to be appointed to the Board at the June shareholders meeting.

Comment from Sir Howard Stringer

“Three years ago, I started to work with the Board on succession plans, and in February, 2009 we named a new generation of leaders to be my management team. Among them was Kaz Hirai, who had distinguished himself through his work in the PlayStation ® and networked entertainment businesses. Kaz is a globally focused executive for whom technology and the cloud are familiar territory, content is highly valued, and digital transformation is second nature. I believe his tough-mindedness and leadership skills will be of great benefit to the company and its customers in the months and years ahead. I look forward to helping Kaz in every way I can so that succession leads inevitably to success. It was my honor to recommend him to the Board for the positions of President and CEO, because he is ready to lead, and the time to make this change is now.”

Comment from Kazuo Hirai

“As challenging as times are for Sony now, were it not for the strong leadership of Sir Howard Stringer these past seven years, we would have been in a much more difficult position. I am grateful to Sir Howard and to the Board for their confidence in me, and I look forward to working with everyone at Sony more closely than ever before to build a strong future for our customers, shareholders, partners and employees. The path we must take is clear: to drive the growth of our core electronics businesses – primarily digital imaging, smart mobile and game; to turn around the television business; and to accelerate the innovation that enables us to create new business domains. The foundations are now firmly in place for the new management team and me to fully leverage Sony’s diverse electronics product portfolio, in conjunction with our rich entertainment assets and growing array of networked services, to engage with our customers around the world in
new and exciting ways.”

Comment from Yotaro Kobayashi, Chairman of the Board

“The Board is grateful to Sir Howard Stringer for all he has done to help Sony travel such a long and vital way down the road from an analogue to a digital company. He has clearly recognized the importance of connecting our tremendous products with networks and content so that our devices come fully alive in the hands of consumers. We agree with Sir Howard that Kazuo Hirai is the right man at the right time to lead Sony. He has a unique capacity to inspire people, to build teams, to make the tough decisions, and to think with clarity and foresight about the challenges we face and how to surmount them. We are also pleased that Sir Howard has accepted our request to remain with Sony after June as Chairman of the Board of Directors. His leadership and experience will be
of immeasurable assistance to us all.”

Kazuo Hirai will take over as the president of Sony in the next few months, Nikkei reported on Friday. Howard Stringer, who previously had served as the president, chairman and CEO of the company will remain on board as chief executive officer. Sony is expected to be a big presence at the Consumer Electronics Show this year and could unveil a “different kind of TV set” early next week. Sony also recently announced that it will purchase Ericsson’s stake in its Sony Ericsson joint venture for $1.47 billion.

[Via The Verge]

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All eyes have been on Apple to reinvent the television set, but Sony CEO Howard Stringer recently confirmed that Sony, too, is working on re-imagining the TV. “There’s a tremendous amount of R&D going into a different kind of TV set,” Stringer said during a breakfast hosted recently by The Wall Street Journal. “We can’t continue selling TV sets [as we currently do]. Every TV set we all make loses money.” Stringer said that he has “no doubt” that Steve Jobs had intentions of designing a brand-new kind of television but said that “it will take a long time to transition to a new form of television.” Read on for more.

It has been widely reported that Apple will use its Siri voice control engine on its TV, but Stringer wasn’t specific on exactly how Sony would change the entertainment staple in living rooms around the world. Stringer explained to The Wall Street Journal that he’s ready to take on whatever Apple will offer with a “four screen” approach that includes mobile devices such as tablets and phones, as well as computers and televisions, but connected TVs are hardly unique. ”I spent the last five years building a platform so I can compete with Steve Jobs,” Stringer boasted. “It’s finished, and it’s launching now.”

Sony recently posted its fourth consecutive quarterly loss and has recognized a decline in quarterly TV sales.

Nearly two and a half months after its networks were breached by the hacker group LulzSec, Sony will finish restoring its PlayStation Network later this week when it reactivates the service in Japan. According to Bloomberg, Sony has been working with the FBI to identify the LulzSec hackers who were responsible for the attack on its San Diego data centers, during which the hackers obtained account information for more than 100 million PlayStation Network users. Reportedly, LulzSec rented and used servers from Amazon.com’s cloud service to facilitate the attack. Sony CEO Howard Stringer apologized after the attacks and offered a year of identity theft protection to those affected by the breach, as well as a free month of access to PSN.

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In an effort to fuel growth across the company, Sony’s CEO — Howard Stringer — has taken a 16% cut in his annual pay according to The Wall Street Journal. Stringer will take home $4.27 million for the fiscal year that ended March 30th, down from the $5.25 million he made last year. During Sony’s shareholder meeting on Tuesday, PlayStation head Kazuo Hirai said that the firm’s “most important task” was turning around its television business — an arm of Sony that has seen seven straight years of losses. Hirai named a number of ways the company could accomplish that task, including boosting the efficiency of operations, tweaking product strategies, and reducing costs.

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Speaking to The New York Times in an interview on Tuesday, Sony’s CEO Howard Stringer discussed the company’s recent security breach, and what his firm is doing to make sure such a large scale attack doesn’t happen again. Stringer argued that Sony reported the breach quickly, despite waiting nearly a week to notify its customers that hackers had stolen personal information, including credit card numbers. “We still have a lot of investigation to do to find out how this happened, but we’re not there yet,” Stringer explained. Sony’s corporate executive officer and executive vice president, Kazuo Hirai, said also noted that Sony is working to examine security on “every level of the company … from televisions to eBooks, and onwards.” Sony will create new security positions within the company, and the security employees with be tasked with setting up a “system to avoid this type of event again — putting a new system in place,” Hirai explained. Sony began restoring its PlayStation Network services in the United States last weekend after issuing a firmware update for the PlayStation 3.

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Sony will access to its PlayStation Network and Qriocity services by May 31st, Bloomberg is reporting. Sony took its networks offline after a confirmed 101 million accounts were compromised and 12.3 million credit card numbers were stolen by hackers. Sony’s president, chairman, and CEO, Howard Stringer, has said Sony is “absolutely dedicated to restoring full and safe service as soon as possible,” and has promised users a “Welcome Back” package that includes a free month of its PlayStation Plus service, as well as credit for the downtime.

[Via Gizmodo]

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While speaking at an event in New York on April 1st, Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer may have accidentally let slip info regarding Apple’s next-generation iPhone 5. Apple has been rumored to be looking for a new camera module supplier for some time, and now it looks as though Sony may be that supplier. Stringer, while speaking to The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg on stage at Carnegie Hall, mentioned that Sony’s image sensor facility in Sendai was impacted by the recent catastrophe in Japan. He then went on to say that this would likely impact the timeliness of sensor shipments to partner companies, using Apple as an example of Sony’s Partners. Sony does not supply camera modules for any current Apple products. Should Sony in fact be supplying image sensors for Apple’s iPhone 5, the sensor in question is likely Sony’s new 8-megapixel Exmor R, which can be found in newer Sony Ericsson devices like the Xperia arc and Xperia neo.

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Things aren’t looking too hot for Sony CEO Howard Stringer. Back in October his company predicted that it would end its current fiscal year with an operating profit of $2.2-billion but a Japanese newspaper is reporting Sony is well on track for a loss of at least $1.1 billion. So what happened to Sony? For starters the Japanese economy, the second largest in the world, was one of hardest hit victims of the credit crunch. Japan’s largest stock market index, the Nikkei 225, ended 2008 down 50% from where it was back in June. Add to this the ongoing fear of deflation due to the rapidly strengthening Yen, soaring national debt, low consumer confidence and very bleak picture is painted of an economy that just doesn’t have the cash to be buying high-end consumer electronics. And of course it doesn’t help that every single nation in the Western world is having severe economic troubles of its own. The only positive thing going for Sony (if you can even call if that) is that its Q4 ends in March, meaning it has a couple more months to drastically cut costs. If Sony don’t make some fairly major moves, its losses on the year could rise to as much as $2-billion. Guess that means the $399 price tag on the PS3 isn’t going to come down any time soon.

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