Sony's strategy to catch Apple

Sony is mixing camera with phone geeks to catch apple

Sony’s Current CEO has sent a couple of Engineer’s from the Camera department to experiment on phones, did it pay off well let’s find out?

It was a big change for a company whose units haven’t been used to collaborating on their thousands of consumer products.

“We used to believe Walkman belonged to the Walkman team and Cyber-shot belonged to the Cyber-shot team,” said Kichiro Kurozumi, who leads the Xperia planning unit, referring to Sony’s music players and compact cameras. In the past, the silos acted like independent companies and “wouldn’t be thrilled to let others use assets they’d invested in,” he said.

The Xperia highlights how Sony is uniting technologies from different departments to create more successful products, Hirai, 52, told reporters in Tokyo. Sony released the Xperia Z’s successor model, the Z1, last month. The company, set to report second-quarter earnings tomorrow, is counting on the handsets to meet Hirai’s goal of becoming the largest smartphone seller after Samsung and Apple.

“He’s fearless about cannibalization, and you can see that in the smartphones they’ve created,” said Takashi Watanabe, a Tokyo-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analyst, describing the changes at Sony under Hirai’s 19-month tenure as “amazing.” “The latest model is so powerful, you wonder whether it will completely destroy the digital camera market.”

Lets see if the mobile market will be kind to Sony.