REVENUE STRATEGY - SONY

1. Sony is tailoring products to differing tastes across the globe putting regional divisions more in charge of their own destiny ensuring that local conditions are better accounted for.
2. Two years ago Howard K. Stringer was hired to be the first Westerner to lead the entire company. Since Stringer's appointment, Sony's U.S. unit has become an important incubator for new products and services.
3. The U.S. consumer electronics unit has become key to Sony's worldwide turnaround efforts.
4. The center's dozen or so designers are doing work that in the past was reserved for headquarters, creating high-margin products, from Internet TV devices to stereo systems, that are helping shore up the bottom line.
5. Sony's U.S. chiefs are increasingly empowered to reject products conceived in Japan that they believe won't fly stateside even if Japan remains the center of Sony's creative universe. Executives in the U.S. now enjoy an unprecedented degree of influence in shaping everything from a gadget's styling to the software that makes it tick. It is a fairly dramatic shift in which communication and collaboration on ideas and projects go both ways.
6. Consumer electronics either conceived or improved in the U.S. have helped stanch losses in other divisions, such as film and music.
7. And the early success of U.S. initiatives has prompted the company to start offering similar products elsewhere. In France and Britain, Sony is now marketing VAIO PCs with built-in cellular broadband access. That strategy, initiated in the U.S., helps boost razor-thin PC margins because Sony collects a fee from cellular carriers every time a user activates the wireless service.
8. The Mylo, a handheld Web-browsing and text-messaging gadget aimed at teens that was designed jointly in Japan and the U.S., was recently introduced in Japan after initial American sales exceeded expectations.
9. Engineers in the U.S. developed a $299 box called the Bravia Internet Video Link that lets TV viewers download video clips from America Online and Yahoo! Inc., as well as films and tunes from Sony Pictures and BMG Music, all with a click of their remote. Sony TV executives in Japan were enthused to build the technology into TVs they sell there as well.
10. The U.S. center is also tweaking designs to boost the appeal of Sony products to American buyers.

“Think global act local” and “think local act global” now blur together well.

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