Sony Corp., the maker of Bravia televisions and Cyber-shot cameras, said Friday it's progressing with plans to cut ¥300 billion ($3.1 billion) in costs this year.
The company is eliminating 16,000 jobs, shutting factories and reducing the number of suppliers to cope with the global recession. Sony last month forecast a second consecutive loss, the first back-to-back deficits since its 1958 listing.
"We're seeing steady progress," Chairman and CEO Howard Stringer, 67, told shareholders Friday at their annual meeting in Tokyo, where the company is based.
Sony aims to marry "brilliant hardware engineers" with "equally strong software," Stringer said. He wants to avoid losing out to rivals' products with better, more advanced functions, as Apple Inc. achieved with its iPod music player and Amazon.com Inc. did with its Kindle book reader, he said.
Stringer, who joined Sony in 1997 and became CEO in 2005, ousted Ryoji Chubachi as president from April 1. "We are not going to be beaten again in the network age," Stringer said. "This is our challenge and our opportunity and this is why we made the structural change. We have not finished, we have a long way to go."
