Is Sony 'Un-Japanese' Enough to Entertain Change?

Is Sony 'Un-Japanese' Enough to Entertain Change?: ""When I look at Japan, I struggle to find large caps with attractive business models," he said, though he noted that Central Japan Railways, which operates the country's most lucrative bullet train lines, could be a "phenomenal" company if management could be persuaded to raise prices and ditch plans to spend $50 billion on a high-speed magnetic levitation rail line from Tokyo to Osaka in western Japan."
The American way of focusing on efficiency is not the only way to raise profits," Atsushi Osanai, associate professor at Waseda Business School, told Reuters Insider television. Osanai worked at Sony from 1997 to 2007. "Japanese companies are not very efficient, but they make very good products and have the ability to create new things. That's more valuable on the long-term scale.

Loeb needs to convince other Sony shareholders that selling part of the entertainment business would both generate cash to help the struggling maker of Bravia TVs and Vaio laptops and improve profitability at Sony Entertainment, which would remain under Sony's control."Westernized companies are in the minority among large caps, for sure. Boards tend to focus on stakeholder management at the expense of shareholder value," said Oscar Veldhuijzen, a London-based fund manager at The Children's Investment Fund Management (UK) LLP. "The background of activism is very negative as it used to be a sort of Mafioso involved with a very different type of activism involving a lot of violence."Sony earns two-thirds of its revenue overseas and, for corporate Japan, appears more westernized. Hirai, who spent most of his childhood in the United States, was picked by former CEO Howard Stringer, a Welshman, in part for his ability to be both a Japanese boss in Sony's domestic electronics hub and a western CEO in the U.S.-centered entertainment business.'via Blog this'