Kommentar:
Sehr interessanter Artikel darüber wie es Sony gelang, Blu-ray gegen HD-DVD durchzusetzen. DesWeiteren gibt es auch Informationen zu den Zielen nach Blu-ray...
Der Führungsriege von Singulus würde es sicherlich auch nicht schaden sich das Buch „Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, Louis V. Gerstner“ und die Stringer-Story an zu schauen.
Warum die Aktie in den letzten Tagen solch heftige Auf- und Abwärtsbewegungen macht, ist mir zwar auch noch ein Rätsel, aber vielleicht haben sich wieder einmal ein paar Banken bzw. Fondmitglieder mit der Führungsriege von Singulus getroffen und haben schon vorab ein paar Informationen, die wir wohl spätestens am 05. Augus (Singulus Quartalsbericht 02/2008) mitgeteilt bekommen. Ich vermute, dass Singulus wieder ein neues Geschäftsfeld oder eine Firma im Visier hat…
Quelle:
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
On The Cover/Top Stories
It Takes a Crisis
Robyn Meredith 07.17.08, 6:00 PM ET
Forbes issue date 08.11.08
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Leaning on a surprising coach, Howard Stringer is partway through the Sony turnaround
Three years ago Sony handed one of the business world's biggest fix-it jobs to Howard Stringer.
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The challenge was daunting: The electronics and entertainment giant was struggling with red ink and management paralysis. Stringer didn't profess to have the answers. "Look, I didn't know what I was doing," he says today.
But he knew where to look for help. Before he started, he read Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?, Louis V. Gerstner Jr.'s book about fixing IBM when it was a corporate dinosaur much like Sony. "You can read Gerstner's book and see a pretty good game plan" for turning around Sony, he says. "It is blindingly obvious, and if it weren't, I wouldn't have been able to do it." As Stringer works to transform Sony, he says he continues to tap Gerstner for advice: He's hired the former IBM chief executive as his personal corporate guru.
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Stringer's goal is to connect its devices--televisions, music players, PlayStation machines--to one another and to a new Sony network for downloading movies, TV shows, games and other digital content. Downloading goes via the PlayStation 3 console, turning it into a home computer server that can handle movie rentals as well as play games. In addition, Sony's Bravia flat-screen TVs will allow viewers to connect to the Internet and stream Hollywood hits without a set-top box or cable subscription; already the TVs can do this with YouTube and other free Internet channels. Sony will send the new Will Smith movie, Hancock, to Internet-ready Bravia TV sets in November, before it can be seen on DVD or on cable. In Stringer's vision of the future, consumers will pay Sony first for televisions and other hardware, then pay Sony again to download movies, music and TV shows. "The battle for me is the networking of these devices," he says. "I have to succeed at that."
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Two of the biggest messes inherited by Stringer--the TV manufacturing and PlayStation businesses--are still dragging down earnings, but he's promised Wall Street that both will turn profitable this year. The TV operation got in trouble because it didn't keep up with the latest technology and was slow to cut manufacturing costs by moving production to lower-wage countries. High development costs and missed deadlines have always plagued the PlayStation business as Sony's engineers tinker endlessly with each model. The powerful PlayStation 3, which uses an IBM-Toshiba-Sony chip that can do 256 billion calculations a second, costs $400 and was late coming to market. Outside videogame outfits have still designed only a limited number of games for it. But one PlayStation-only game released in June, Metal Gear Solid 4, has been driving sales of the machine. Sony expects to sell 10 million in this fiscal year, while holding prices steady, enough to put that business into the black.
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He needed a plan, fast. Step by step, it's all there in Gerstner's book. Like Gerstner, Stringer leaned on a smart finance guy from outside (Chapter Three) and moved quickly to stop the red ink by cutting $2 billion in costs. To raise cash and realign the company's strategy (Chapter Six), he sold $1.5 billion in noncore businesses, such as a semiconductor factory. Last fall Sony sold a $2.8 billion, 40% stake in its financial and life insurance company in one of Japan's biggest initial public offerings. Like Gerstner, Stringer made a clear strategic choice not to follow Wall Street calls to break up the company, opting to try to turn Sony's breadth into a strength.
Along the way, Stringer surrounded himself with smart people and didn't micromanage them--partly because, like Gerstner, who had joined IBM from RJR Nabisco, the media executive didn't know enough about many of the company's business lines to do so (Chapter Two). "Given my background--which is either a strength or a weakness--I run things by people," Stringer says.
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Indeed, until last summer Sony's turnaround was ticking along, but Stringer's "Sony United" concept was still little more than a slogan. Suddenly Sony faced a crucial test: Its Blu-ray technology was in jeopardy. To contain the mass of bits needed to display movies in high definition, Sony and partners (including Philips, Samsung and lg Electronics) came up with Blu-ray--the discs are read by blue lasers--while Toshiba pushed a cheaper format called HD-DVD. A standards war was brewing--another Betamax-versus-VHS battle.
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In Tokyo the night the Paramount news broke, Stringer set up a global conference call to brainstorm ideas for stopping Toshiba. He called on every division to play a part, seizing on the crisis to force the company to work together. A company changes its entrenched habits only when it is under stress. So says Gerstner, in Chapter Seven.
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This was a startling change from when Lynton joined in 2004: "The picture company didn't talk to the music company, and we didn't talk to the electronics company." Divisions could haggle for a month before agreeing on, say, how much the Sony studio would pay for Sony TVs or cell phones used on movie sets. Not anymore.
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For the studios and retailers, Sony's big argument was that even though Blu-ray and HD-DVD were neck and neck in player sales, Blu-ray was really ahead by 1.8 million. That's if you count the videogame fans who own PlayStation 3 players, because they play Blu-ray discs. So Sony executives went to work persuading Hollywood studios that Blu-ray wasn't the next Betamax. It fell to Wiesenthal, Stringer's U.S. finance man, to lobby one studio, Lionsgate, to make sure it didn't agree to payments from Toshiba (which doesn't own a studio). "The relationship between Sony and Lionsgate was going to continue a lot longer than the relationship between Toshiba and Lionsgate," he argued, making cell phone calls from a boat while on vacation off Long Island, N.Y. "Toshiba was not going to cofinance one of their movies."
Peter Dille, a marketing official at Sony's U.S. games unit, suggested wooing rival Hollywood studios--Lynton's competitors--by including snippets of their movies in PlayStation 3 ads. The free advertising would get the industry's attention. Message to Hollywood: "This does more than play games," Dille says
With Toshiba cutting its price, Sony needed to sell more players. Its headstrong gaming division agreed to cut PlayStation 3's price by $100, then began selling an even cheaper version with half the memory, even though it would crimp the division's profits. Sony executives from Los Angeles, San Diego, New York and Tokyo converged on Best Buy headquarters in Minneapolis to spend a half-day in meetings. Sony offered to help pay for Best Buy ads in Sunday newspapers nationwide, to pay for Blu-ray store displays and to offer discounted Blu-ray packages--a Bravia TV sold with a Blu-ray player and five free discs, for instance. Sony execs also made pilgrimages to Wal-Mart, Target (nyse: TGT - news - people ), Circuit City (nyse: CC - news - people ) and other chains.
Despite rumors to the contrary, Sony executives say they did not pay movie studios to side with Blu-ray in the format war. But Sony did spend more than $60 million advertising PlayStation 3 from November to January in the U.S., according to tns Media Intelligence, bringing free attention to Hollywood movies and retailers alike.
The swing vote turned out to be home entertainment giant Warner Brothers. After scrutinizing holiday sales of players, Warner announced on Jan. 4 that it would adopt the Blu-ray standard.
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Quelle:
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
[..]"A company changes its entrenched habits only when it is under stress"[..]
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