One of the largest representatives of this production line is Foxconn. Production of Sony TVs by outsourcing, assembly at third-party companies. India, Slovakia, Mexico, China, Russia. India is trying to provide jobs for its population, the large overpopulation and lack of work is forcing a very large number of people in India to live below the poverty line.
To increase jobs and attract foreign investors to the country, the Indian government has imposed heavy taxes on imports of electronics, forcing companies to move the production of their products to India. Foxconn assembles TVs under the Sony brand.
Sony televisions made in India are sold in India and are hardly exported to other countries. Sony produced TV sets in Spain until In , it was decided to close the factory in Spain.
The factory was sold to Ficosa Corporation, which specializes in the production of components for the automotive industry. Production of Sony TVs in Spain has stopped.
There were two TV assembly plants in Slovakia. One was opened in in the city of Nitra. TV sets from this factory were sold in the East European markets.
The second factory worked since in Trnava which produced parts for TV sets assembling. The factory in Trnava was gradually closed and the production of components became unprofitable. There were 32 TV assembly lines at the plant.
Foxconn began assembling Sony televisions to order. This plant produces an average of about 3 million Sony televisions a year. These televisions are shipped to European markets. The official language of Sony is not Japanese but English. If more than one gaijin non-Japanese is present in a company meeting, the meeting is held in English. Since , the US part of Sony has sold more goods than the Japanese part. And the gap has grown each succeeding year. Sony Corporation of America, formed last year in a reorganization that put all US operations under one roof, employs more than 30, people, two-thirds of them in the US.
It exports over half a billion dollars worth of products from the US per year — nearly a third of everything it builds.
If Sony Corporation of America were a separate company, it would rank 58th in the Fortune Its chair, Mickey Schulhof, is American, as are most of the executives of the subsidiaries under him — except for Olaf Olafsson, the year-old Icelandic novelist who heads Sony Electronic Publishing.
Sony has been manufacturing in the US since it opened a Trinitron plant in San Diego in — and by now many of the televisions that come out of its American plants are completely made in America. Warburg in Tokyo. But this shift away from Japan is not really new. The name was picked for its look in Roman letters, for the Latin sonus or sound , and for the resonance with the happy English words "sunny" and "sonny boy. Sony wants to bridge the gap between hardware and software, to become the first global company that builds both the boxes and what comes out of them.
It is this desire that is shifting Sony's center of gravity away from Japan. As another Sony executive put it, "The US is where the future of the company unfolds. Sony is moving more and more into businesses that are quintessentially American. The place never looked better: the buildings that manage to combine Southern colonial with chrome-and-glass Art Deco; the buff, powerful magnolias that somehow never seem to drop a leaf; the manicured lawns; the streets between the sound stages tarted up with false fronts and shops like a Disney movie theme park; all looking less gritty and more Hollywood-as-we-imagine-it than it ever did under its original owners.
And in San Jose, California, amid the vast empty spaces and orange groves north of downtown rises an enormous new building: Sony's new high-tech research center, with its four-story atrium as long as a football field.
All glass in front, all white inside, all Sony gray slate flooring, it is as large as an airport terminal, unpeopled but for two receptionists, the galleries above and beyond them brimming with the engineers and programmers of Sony's rapidly growing presence in Silicon Valley.
It's a question of who makes the decisions. If you expect to win here, you have to make decisions here, not in Tokyo. In the colonnaded Saturday-lunch quiet of the dining room of New York's St. Regis hotel, Kuni Ando suddenly pops a line from the musical New York!
New York! President and CEO Norio Ohga has told Sony's global executives, "Don't think of what Tokyo says as the golden flag" the battle flag of the shogun that all must follow. In the last few years, with the rise of the yen and America's ferocious competition on quality, American labor has become cheaper than Japanese labor in high-tech industries — as have American parts. And America has what Pradip Banerjee, a manager at the San Jose chip design center, calls "the talented people that we need to attract.
While was a record year for the entertainment hardware business in the US, the Japanese and European economies have continued to wallow in recession. This year, the German economy is expected to grow by 0. And in some areas, the Japanese market is simply not as mature as the US market.
It's hard to build the consumer end of the infobahn in a country where most homes aren't wired for cable. Technical and research decisions are not specific to a culture or bound by geography, aesthetic decisions, and service capabilities.
Corporate power follows the work. If you design it here, you've got to have major decision-making power here. So this authority is shifting to the US. With that shift comes a certain independence. In fact, American Sony units have carried out many projects despite Tokyo's disapproval, including for instance the entire "My First Sony" line.
Headquarters didn't see the point — who would buy electronics in brightly colored cases with big knobs? Tokyo also didn't see the point of the "Vision" project an inexpensive teleconferencing box with a charge-coupled videocam, a microphone, and some special circuitry, made to fit atop your monitor. Ando says, "We talked to them for over a year. They didn't get it. So our factory in San Diego took it on. Tim Agnew, an executive at Sony's display systems group in San Diego, says, "The 'Vision' idea was a bit of a struggle, and there was some tension, but they didn't stop us.
The rest I can scramble up here or somewhere else in Sony of America. Sony is in three main lines of business: consumer electronics the Walkman, TVs, boomboxes , professional and business electronics telephones and telecommunications, computer peripherals, semiconductors, broadcasting equipment, medical imaging, display systems, factory automation systems , and popular recorded entertainment music and movies, movie theaters, CD- ROMs.
The first two have been on Sony's worktable since the company's founding in The third business is new, in part because the first two have gotten more and more difficult. The traditional engine of Sony was 1 inventing new technologies, then 2 turning them into products, and 3 marketing the hell out of them.
But the increasing speed of change itself is making that an ever-riskier formula. That trend toward making a commodity of electronics was one of the motivations to get into the entertainment business. If you have Jack Nicholson or Barbra Streisand, nobody can copy that.
For decades Japan has been king of electronics, especially consumer electronics. Ever since it introduced the first successful transistor radio in , Sony has led much of that charge, with the first pocket-sized radio, the first AM-FM transistor radio, the first transistor television, the first home VCR, the charge-coupled device, the Walkman, the CD with Philips , the MiniDisc, and other innovations. Then, in the s, Japan invaded Hollywood. Its entertainment products are produced at various international locations and distributed around the world.
Consumer products made by Sony include digital and video cameras, auto sound systems, home audio systems, DVD players, Blue-ray disc players and television sets. Sony also makes batteries, optical disk drives and semiconductors. The company has secured a wider reach into consumer homes through its Sony Pictures Television entertainment division.
Under this division, the company develops, produces and distributes numerous television programs, movies and digital entertainment.
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