Gerhard Fasol.

Tag: SONY

  • Japan’s electronics conglomerates: Whats the difference between Apple/IBM vs Sony/Panasonic/NEC?

    Japan’s electronics conglomerates: Whats the difference between Apple/IBM vs Sony/Panasonic/NEC?

    Why are Apple/IBM/Microsoft/Google so very different compared to SONY/Panasonic/NEC

    Need for corporate governance reforms in Japan

    Japan's electronics conglomerates: Whats the difference between Apple/IBM vs Sony/Panasonic/NEC?
    Japan’s electronics conglomerates: Whats the difference between Apple/IBM vs Sony/Panasonic/NEC?

    My friend’s question: Why are Apple/IBM/Microsoft/Google so very different compared to SONY/Panasonic/NEC

    Gerhard Fasol’s answer: Profit and growth. Apple and IBM grow and are highly profitable. Sony, Panosonic and NEC have no growth and no profit for 15 years – read here:
    http://www.eurotechnology.com/2013/05/20/japans-big-8-electronics-giants-fy2012-results-announced/
    for more detailed analysis, read our Report on Japan’s electronics sector

    My friend’s question: Gerhard, we know about the difference in profitability and growth. The question is, what made such a difference in profitability and growth

    Gerhard Fasol’s answer: there are many down-stream issues, e.g. acquisition of cloud startups, execution etc. Much of this is summarized in an excellent talk by Masamoto Yashiro, which I have written up here: http://www.fasol.com/2013/10/19/masamoto-yashiro/

    There are:

    1. superficial reasons, like YEN-rate, interest rate, global recession etc
    2. execution and management issues, the kind of stuff you learn at Business Schools
    3. the big underlying issues

    the big underlying issues are brains (=hardware) and education (=operating system and software for those brains).

    There are many fantastic Japanese companies. In a free market, its no surprise that companies are born and others die. Its called Schumpeter’s creative destruction. In a way its more surprising that companies can survive so long with a long-dead business model.

    Have you heard about the German company AEG? AEG built the electricity system for Tokyo a long time ago – thats why Tokyo has 50Hz and Osaka has 60Hz. AEG disappeared about 30-40 years ago. There are still some companies today licensing the AEG brand, which is still famous, however, the traditional AEG company disappeared with bankruptcy in 1980. You can read about this here: http://www.csmonitor.com/1982/0812/081250.html

    it says:
    “Plagued by bad management throughout the 1970s, West Germany’s 10th largest employer overextended itself and became involved in too many loss-making enterprises. It invested heavily in the wrong kind of nuclear technology and its domestic appliances business fell prey to growing competition in a stagnant market.
    In the last four years, it posted operating losses of 4 billion marks ($1.6 billion) and despite massive injections of credit from the banks in 1979 and again last year, it did not recover. Mr. Duerr partly blames the worldwide recession and high interest rates for the failure.”

    Sounds familiar? thats AEG in 1980.

    Copyright (c) 2013 Eurotechnology Japan KK All Rights Reserved

  • BBC interview about SONY earning results

    Helped BBC with the article “Sony earnings boosted by weak yen and smartphone sales“

  • SONY (manuscript invited by BBC, preparation for interview)

    Games are 11% of SONY‘s sales – and currently 56% of SONY’s profits come from selling life insurance, consumer loans and financial products in Japan. Games are important, but are not going to make or break SONY at this time.

    Technical specs of the next Playstation need to be fantastic. Specs alone however have not been the main focus for quite some time now. Smart phones, social games, smooth linking of all “screens” are disrupting the games sector. In Japan, the social games market is already twice the value of the traditional game console market (excluding software): in anticipation of their global success, GREE and DeNA combined have climbed to half the market cap of all of SONY.

    SONY’s game business model also faces disruption by free and $.99 “snack-type” games, downloaded to mobile phones and tablets – to win in this sector SONY would have to beat Rovio’s Angry Birds brand and their galactic and Starwars games among others. Its hard for SONY to please both hardcore gamers, and the much larger audience of casual gamers looking for quick in-between low cost or free game “snacks”.

    If I was CEO of SONY, another fact I would worry about is that there are currently about 800 games on Playstation, while here are about 130,000 games on iOS, and more than 100 new games submitted to Apple everyday. Now if Apple would take this enormous developer support to a next generation Apple-TV ecosystem, I would have sleepless nights about my whole game business division if I was SONY-CEO.

    Personally, I like SONY’s acquisition of the cloud game platform Gaikai. It will be key for SONY to keep a great team at Gaikai. Ultimately Gaikai might become SONY’s most important game platform. Improving the specs of SONY’s Playstations is necessary for SONY to remain a console player – however for business success SONY needs to drive disruption instead of reacting to others like Apple or Rovio. Gaikai could give SONY that chance. SONY’s own studios could also be a more important weapon in the game.

    SONY is often taken as a poster child for Japan’s stagnation: over the last 15 years, SONY showed essentially no revenue growth and close to zero average profits and margin. However, CANON proves that even a Japanese electronics company can deliver consistent growth and good margins, but copying CANON of course is not the way to go. SONY will need to create its own way.

    Read more analysis in our report on Japan’s electronics sector

  • More Drastic Changes Needed at Sony (CNBC TV interview)

    More Drastic Changes Needed at Sony (CNBC TV interview)

    Read more about SONY and Japan’s electrical industry sector: http://www.eurotechnology.com/store/j_electric/

    Copyright (c) 2013 Eurotechnology Japan KK All Rights Reserved

  • BBC world TV interview about wallet phones

    Read our CEO’s interview on BBC World TV about FeliCa wallet phones.

    Watch the movie of the interview:
    Windows Media Player – Bandwith = Low|Medium|High
    Real Player – Bandwith = Low|Medium|High

    Read our report Mobile payments in Japan.

    Copyright·©2013 ·Eurotechnology Japan KK·All Rights Reserved·

  • SonyEricsson design team presentation & discussion

    The SonyEricsson mobile phone design team gave a very impressive presentation of their work at the Swedish Embassy yesterday.

    Here is Art Director Mr Kawagoi, who created the famous SonyEricsson logo, explaining the messages contained in his creation:

    SONY-Ericsson Design Director explaining his thoughts behind creating the SONY-Ericsson logo
    SONY-Ericsson Design Director explaining his thoughts behind creating the SONY-Ericsson logo

    Here Swedish Managers of the SonyEricsson Creative Design Center from Lund/Sweden:

    SONY-Ericsson presentation at the Embassy of Sweden in Tokyo
    SONY-Ericsson presentation at the Embassy of Sweden in Tokyo

    My conclusion: expect a lot more great designs out of SonyEricsson. Also, there is every indication it’s a very successful Japan-Swedish cooperation.

    [images in this post are taken with a DoCoMo/Sharp SH900i 3G/FOMA camera-phone in 2Megapixel setting, and sent through the air via DoCoMo’s FOMA network. Images are reproduced here in much less than the original 1224 x 1632 pixel size, which would not fit on most PC screens.]

    Copyright·©1997-2013 ·Eurotechnology Japan KK·All Rights Reserved·

  • Masaru Ibuka (1908-1997), founder of SONY, obituary for NATURE

    Masaru Ibuka (1908-1997), founder of SONY, obituary for NATURE

    Masaru Ibuka obituary in NATURE by Gerhard Fasol

    Masaru Ibuka (1908-1997), founder of SONY

    After Masaru Ibuka (井深大) died on December 19, 1997, NATURE asked me to write an obituary about Masaru Ibuka, which was published in Nature on February 26, 1998, and you can download the article as a pdf-file here. The reference is: Gerhard Fasol, “Obituary: Masaru Ibuka (1908-97)”, Nature 391, p. 848 (26 February 1998).

    Masaru Ibuka obituary in NATURE by Gerhard Fasol – the background

    I used several weeks of my spare time to research and write this obituary. For example, I worked to reach and talk with several people who had met Ibuka in person, since I had never personally met Ibuka. As another example: General McArthur’s Government of Japan wanted to communicate with the population of Japan via radio, however, radio receiver production in Japan was very inefficient at that time due to quality problems, leading to very low yield. So General McArthur’s Government brought Quality experts Homer Sarasohn and Charles Protzmann to Japan to teach classes in quality management. I found out that Ibuka was a keen student of these quality classes. To understand this better, I phoned with a retired officer of General McArthur’s Government, and I also found relatives of Homer Sarasohn, who very kindly gave me a lot of information about Homer Sarasohn’s work in teaching quality management in Japan.

    Debunking some myths about SONY and Masaru Ibuka

    Interestingly, there is a lot of misunderstandings and myths around SONY, some of which I clarified in the Nature obituary for Masaru Ibuka.

    Myth: Akio Morita is the founder of SONY

    Reality: SONY was founded as Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyusho (the Tokyo Communications Laboratory) by Masaru Ibuka and by Akio Morita, who are the two co-founders of Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyusho, the company name was later changed to SONY.

    Myth in Japan: Many people in Japan think that SONY is an American company

    Reality: SONY is a Japanese company with headquarters in Tokyo-Shinagawa. The reason why many people think that SONY is an American company, is that SONY’s company name and brand name in Japan is written in Katakana, while traditional Japanese companies always write their company in Chinese characters (Kanji). (Note however, that Nissan President Carlos Ghosn, says that companies have no nationality).

    Myth: Nobel Prize winner Leo Esaki discovered the tunnel diode, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, at IBM

    Reality: Leo Esaki discovered the tunnel diode as a researcher at Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyusho, which later changed the company name to SONY. Leo Esaki then moved to IBM Yorktown Heights R&D labs, and was awarded the Nobel Prize while working at IBM for his discovery of the tunnel diode, which he discovered while working at Tokyo Tsushin Kenkyusho.

    Read more about today’s SONY:

    More about SONY and Japan’s electronic companies in our Report on Japan’s electronics industry.

    Copyright (c) 1996-2014 Eurotechnology Japan KK All Rights Reserved