The knives are coming out for 10,000 Sony employees as new CEO Kazuo Hirai tries to get the company back on track. Sony hasn’t made a profit in four years now (thus the *new* CEO). No pink slips being handed out right away, no cardboard boxes to put sad plants in, no security guards being called in to make sure people don’t flip out. The cuts will go into effect over the next two years.
The Wall Street Journal says the cuts will be more of a lopping off of whole chunks rather than steadily trimming:
A large part of the headcount reduction will come from selling or spinning off businesses not considered core to the company, the people familiar with the situation said. Indeed, Sony has said the already-announced unloading of two businesses could shift as many as 5,000 jobs outside of the company. Last month, Sony said it reached a deal to sell its chemical-products business to the Development Bank of Japan. And it spun off its unit making small-to-midsize liquid crystal displays to the newly formed Japan Display Inc., a venture backed by the government, Sony, Toshiba Corp. and Hitachi Ltd.
The TV division is also expected to take a big hit.
We all loved the Walkman and certainly the PlayStation has been all kinds of fun but it’s hard to think of a contemporary Sony product that is a real established hit. We’ll see if this does anything to remedy that.
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