When Akio Morita, the late founder of Sony, took home the small stereo-cassette player from which his engineers had removed the record function, he soon realised that this was going to be a popular item. And so was born the Walkman, one of the world's hottest consumer-electronics products. Since 1995, Sony has been led by Nobuyuki Idei, but the hit products have seemed fewer and the Japanese company's fortunes have grown bleaker. This week, Mr Idei made his latest attempt to get to grips with the problem when he announced a bold (by Japanese standards) restructuring plan for Sony's core electronics business. Sony will shed 20,000 jobs (7,000 of them in Japan), shut 30% of the firm's plants and aggressively streamline its supply chain. More assembly work will be shifted to low-wage countries, such as China. Sony's Japanese operations will concentrate more on high-end technologies, such as sophisticated semiconductors for its devices. Mr Idei pledges that, by 2007, Sony's operating profit margins will rise from 3% now to 10%.
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