http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3b7c0afe-76eb-11e5-a95a-27d368e1ddf7,s01=1.html?ftcamp=traffic/partner/feed_headline/us_yahoo/auddev Ugh.. nevermind. I can't paste a usable link and can't delete my post. I originally found it on Yahoo Finance - Business Finance, Stock Market, Quotes, News but it seems all the resulting links lead to a paywall.
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3b7c0afe-76eb-11e5-a95a-27d368e1ddf7.html Maybe better to Google this, one of the first hits is the FT link "The head of a Japanese government investment fund and a shareholder in a key Apple supplier"
South Korea, China, anyone building EVs when they take off... Maybe it is Tesla, or Apple & their automotive partner, or Google & their automotive partner. He agrees with Sergio that there is too much capacity in the industry.
i wonder what their plan of attack will be. seems like the old japanese electronics companies like sony didn't keep up with technology or pricing.
Yep. Exactly! Sony was dominant for awhile w/stuff like Walkman, Discman and Trinitron TVs. But then came the iPod. Look at their market position in the TV world now (along w/other Japanese TV makers like Toshiba, Panasonic and Sharp (Sharp Reports Net Annual Loss Of $4.66 Billion Amid Dismal LCD, TV Sales Hisense to buy Sharp America in $23.7M deal - CNET)) vs. say Samsung, LG and then a bunch of lower tier TV companies (e.g. TCL, Vizio, Hisense, etc.) Sony has no share in the smartphone world. How about the rest of the major Japanese CE makers in the smartphone space? Again compare to Apple (w/~90% of smartphone industry profits) then Samsung. Sony tried e-book readers, but that never got very far and it seems like Amazon's the gorilla. None of the Japanese CE makers have any substantial market share in tablets either. It's pretty much Apple, Samsung then a bunch of smaller players.
Sony's made so many mistakes in judgment over the years it's hard to keep track. They did fight back and regain some of their competence in say, audio electronics, but in each and every product, they tried so hard to be the one and only. Think memory sticks, their incredible failure in Blue Ray. BR eventually won the battle, but by then, all of the prizes were gone. The other Japanese companies stayed in place trying to duke it out in commodity businesses like TV's, and never provided anything better. One of the few companies I could look to there that got it to some extent was Canon. From time to time I see the same sort of mindset at Toyota. Thankfully, not nearly as lethal. Although when it comes to fuel cells, I looked hard to see if there were some Sony managers and engineers in on the project
Most of those companies are just Brands now. The embarrassing part about Sony, is that they're really trying hard
That and I recall they had a bunch of portable music players w/DRM-ed ATRAC file format support. I believe their CD ripping software/management software only generated DRMed files. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong here.) Obviously, these players never caught on vs. the iPod. And, now it doesn't matter anymore. Yeah... that's the problem. Many of these products became too commoditized where consumers would often just buy cheap stuff or stuff that was "good enough", which often was actually good enough, for most.
