Sony Restructuring Plan: What it Means For Camcorders

Sony has recently announced the details of their restructuring plan. Under the new boss Howard Stringer, the company is looking to save a significant sum (around 200 billion yen, approximately $1.8 billion) by reorganizing the company and laying off 10,000 staff worldwide. The highlights of the plan include cutting the number of product lines that the company offers by 20% and getting rid of 11 manufacturing locations. However, it looks like camcorders won’t be overly affected: digital imaging (which includes camcorders and digital still cameras) has been identified as one of the focus areas that the company will be working to keep a dominant market position in.

 

Sony has also decided that HD video will be “a major integrated profit pillar”. Which translates from the marketing speech as something that they want to sell a lot of, and make big money doing so. So we can expect to see more HD camcorders and related products. Blu-Ray (Sony’s HD DVD format) is also a big part of the new strategy, starting with the Playstation 3, which is due to be launched early next year. The company is also creating a new development center to create products that use the revolutionary cell processor that the Playstation 3 is built around, and this might be an interesting fit for camcorders: the cell processor is designed to be able to quickly process video images.

 

There's a great analysis of what the changes mean for the company as a whole here.