Japanese electronics giant or will quit Chinese Sony "Japanese Dream" broken

Xiao Mei, who has worked at Sony's China headquarters for many years, has a very tangled heart recently. The company gave her two choices: if you want to stay in Sony, have a decent job and a lot of income, you have to go to Japan or the United States to work in Sony, with husbands and young children separated; If you want to stay in China, Then you have to settle your wages and compensation, and go away from Sony.

Xiao Mei's situation is that many Sony Chinese employees are facing or are about to face the situation. Sony is planning to retreat from mainland China because of the growing slump in business. This is already a public secret among Sony's in-house employees.

Consumer electronics business: from pillar to baggage

Consumer electronics is the backbone of Sony products, accounting for more than 60% of Sony's overall business. Sony has been a leader in television, cameras, gaming consoles, mobile phones, computers, especially personal music players and optical discs, and is a well-deserved front-runner globally, and has made a contribution to Sony's performance growth and brand value promotion.

But in the last more than 10 years, Sony has been like a cancer-sick old man, deteriorating and continuously losing money for years. and "tumor" is growing in Sony's core business electronic products.

Data show that the 2011 fiscal year, Sony net loss of 457 billion yen (about 5.7 billion U.S. dollars). In fiscal 2012, Sony achieved its first profit in 5 years, with net profits of 43 billion yen (about $458 million), but not by the performance of its core electronics business but by the sale of fixed assets and business – Sony has raised billions of of dollars by selling some of its shares in the office building in New York headquarters in the United States and in Tokyo's office building and its network medical service provider, M3.

The Consumer electronics business, which is the core business of Sony, continues to be mired in losses: in fiscal year 2012, Sony TV lost 69.6 billion yen (about 650 million US dollars) for 9 consecutive years, and the handset business lost 97.2 billion yen (about 900 million dollars). The gaming and camera business, while slightly profitable, is entirely negligible relative to the loss of televisions and handsets: the gaming business has a profit of 1.7 billion yen (about $16 million) and a camera business profit of 1.4 billion yen (about $13 million).

In fiscal year 2013, Sony lost 128.4 billion yen (about $1.25 billion) in net loss. Sony forecasts that the 2014 fiscal year will also be 50 billion yen (about 480 million U.S. dollars) losses. Sony Finance has forecast that the biggest loss in fiscal year 2014 could expand to 230 billion yen (about $2.1 billion).

Consumer electronics business has become a huge burden for Sony's future, affecting the benign operation and development of Sony. A television set that used to be Sony's iconic business has caused nearly 8 billion of billions of dollars of losses to Sony over the past decade, according to the US Business Week.

Hirai on stage, in order to achieve profitability, constantly in doing subtraction, fixed assets and poor performance of the business is the first consideration to sell the part of the cash. It is worth observing that Hirai will not gradually sell the consumer electronics business. If there is no consumer electronics business Sony, but also the consumer memory of the Sony brand?

Lack of innovative products

Hirai, who sits on the helm of Sony, has said he wants to turn a profit. This is an interesting goal, which, in the view of Chinese entrepreneurs, can be interpreted as Mr Hirai is too ambitious. But in Sony's view, this is both practical and daunting-a sad situation for Sony from the outset of the global benchmarking business.

Although the devaluation of the yen has benefited the export-oriented multinational giant, it is still difficult for Hirai to realize his "Japanese dream". We see that for the fast-falling Sony, Hirai impotent, its usual tactic is to sell fixed assets, to shrink fronts, to sell business sectors, such as Sony, which recently sold E-books to Kobo, a Canadian e-reader maker, and to lay off workers, and Sony recently unveiled a global layoff of 5000 people, The mobile division has laid off 1000 people.

In fact, Sony's core problem is the product. Over the years, Sony has not launched a landmark innovative product, which makes Sony products are basically unable to do the industry. And its positioning and relatively high-end, it is difficult to open the market, to achieve large-scale sales. The scarcity of innovative products makes it difficult for their products to support their high prices.

Currently, Sony's major global markets are Japan, the United States, Europe and China. According to its earnings in the first quarter of 2014, Sony has achieved revenue of 133.041 billion yen (about $1.33 billion, 7.6 billion yuan) in the Chinese market, accounting for 7.4% of Sony's global market. The number, which barely qualifies as a sales revenue for a medium-sized Chinese company, is smaller than Samsung's sales in China, as well as China's Haier, Lenovo and Gree, and is not at a heavyweight level-they have long stopped Sony as a competitor.

In addition to the Chinese market, Sony's performance in the European market is not optimistic. Earlier this year, Sony announced a formal retreat from the London Stock Exchange, which continued trading only on the Tokyo and New York exchanges. It is also understood as a strong signal that Sony will be withdrawing from the European market in the future.

Of course, to achieve the improvement of the business situation, Sony also launched a number of new products, including game consoles PS4 and the new flagship Xperia Z3. This has played a positive role in improving Sony's operations, but it cannot change the crux of Sony's slow decision-making, lack of innovative passion for its main products, insufficient competitiveness, and the market to deal with rigidity, thus unable to change Sony's predicament from the root.