Sony"s newly named CEO Kazuo Hirai doesn"t officially take over the big chair at the Japanese electronics and media company until April 1. But Hirai isn"t shy about talking about how the company needs to do something in order to stop the financial issues that have hit Sony in the past few years.
Hirai, who will take over from the current CEO Sir Howard Stringer, said in a new interview with The Wall Street Journal that he sees a time where the company could be in even worse shape if things don"t change. He states:
We really need to buckle down and be realistic I don"t think everybody is on board, but I think people are coming around to the idea that if we don"t turn this around, we could be sitting in some serious trouble.
Hirai says he wants to cut some of the company"s costs along with revamping Sony"s overall structure. He believes that the previous structure has prevented Sony from launching new and innovative products.
The article points out that Hirai made a number of changes while he was in charge of Sony"s Playstation business. The changes, which included swaping the plastic PS3 logo on the console to a painted version, turned the Playstation division into a profitable business after the first year of the Playstation 3 launch, when the division lost $2 billion.