Sony Promotes Two Top Execs

Japanese electronics giant Sony Corp. is elevating its two top entertainment and gaming executives to prominent posts in Tokyo, the latest in a series of moves that signal closer ties between its entertainment and device businesses.

The company announced Monday that Howard Stringer, the chairman and chief executive of Sony Corp. of America, would take on the additional roles of corporate vice chairman, head of Sony’s operations in the Americas region and head of the newly organized entertainment business group.

Stringer is the first person from outside Japan, and the first head of Sony’s movie and music operations, to reach the rank of vice chairman, officials said.

Sony also announced that Ken Kutaragi, president and chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., would add the duties of corporate executive deputy president. The move enhances the standing of Kutaragi, the man responsible for Sony’s successful PlayStation business, as a potential successor to Sony’s corporate chief executive, Nobuyuki Idei.

“When you have a unit that makes up 40% of the Sony Corp.’s overall profits in peak years, it attracts notice,” said analyst James Lin of Jeffries & Co., an investment bank in Los Angeles.

Kutaragi is a controversial and high-profile executive known for breaking the rules of Sony’s focused culture.

Monday’s news was the latest twist in Sony’s long-term strategy of staying one step ahead in the ever-competitive and ever-mutating world of consumer electronics -- far from its beginnings as a rice-cooker manufacturer in Tokyo after World War II. Such a strategy comes as part of a necessary and sometimes difficult quest to reinvent one of the world’s best-known companies into a network gadget and services giant, while holding off competitors as varied as Nokia, Microsoft Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co.

As part of the corporate shifting, and a reflection of its broader strategy to position itself as a leader both in the content and hardware arenas, Sony also plans to restructure the lines between its various global businesses. Effective today, it will split the focus from three core business units to seven smaller groups.

The home network business, for example, will work on next-generation TVs and other Internet-connected devices, while the broadband network company will develop products that link the Net to game machines and computers.

Other units, including the game business and information technologies and mobile solutions network, also will be focusing on networked products. And the entertainment group will be charged with creating a business model for the electronic distribution of Sony’s movies and music.

Richard Doherty of the Envisioneering Group, a technology research and consulting firm in Seaford, N.Y., said, “The intertwining of content, hardware and operations is what’s different about this reorganization.”

He added that Kutaragi’s elevation reflects the importance of the next PlayStation, which is not a game console as much as it is “the next-generation entertainment platform” for Sony.

“No one knows better how this next-generation Sony system will need to fit into living rooms -- and into people’s purses and briefcases, in portable versions -- than Kutaragi,” he said.