After it previously “forgot” about the emotion needed to create desirable products, Sony seems to have improved its fortunes after revealing its first Bravia OLED TV at the CES tech show in Las Vegas.
The Japanese technology giant is directly challenging rivals Samsung and LG by using OLED in its screens for the first time, a move chief executive Kazuo Hirai says was driven by an upturn in fortunes and a belief it could now stand out from its rivals.
Sony reported the biggest loss in its history (£5.1 billion) in 2012, the same year Hirai became CEO, and thousands of jobs were cut. However, his reorganisation of the business and change of approach has seen numbers improve and between 2014 and 2015 income rose by more than £1.5 billion, creating new confidence.
“One (change) is obviously the renewed focus on just making sure that we have strong product,” Hirai said.
“And when I say strong product we’re not just talking about features and functionality but strong product that appeals to the emotional part – what I call emotional value – in all of our products.
“They should be precious items. I think we may have forgotten that for a while and started to basically compete just on features, functionality and price and that’s only half the equation because we’re famous and we’re known for design and that emotional value aspect.”
Hirai called the firm’s TV business along with its audio products “literally the history of the company” and said it would continue to try to innovate in these areas.
This year at CES that includes introducing a TV that contains Acoustic Surface technology, where the sound vibrates out through the screen, removing the need for any speakers.
“Because we’re not the first to market and there are other companies who actually have OLED TVs on the market as we speak, we need to be able to differentiate it through our technology, our design and obviously picture quality,” Hirai said.
“We brought it out now because we knew we could differentiate (from competitors), in a nutshell.”
Having begun at the company on the original PlayStation console, Hirai also spoke of his excitement for the future of PlayStation VR, Sony’s virtual reality system that was released last year.
“I started at Sony Computer Entertainment on the original PlayStation and that was back in 1994-95 and look how far we’ve come,” he said.
“It’s 20 years I get that, but in 20 years we’ve gone from saying ‘wow’ at 3D polygons to this. It’s why I think video game entertainment is so interesting because the technology leap you have in each generation is so expansive compared to motion pictures, for example. It’s a pretty exciting industry.”
