| deskpro2k3 said: Selling off assets they don't need is good in the long run. Anything they don't need just leeches money away that can be put to better use. Surely Kaz have a plan to dominate the world. |
This has nothing to do with "Selling off assets they don't need". Obviously those employees need some place to work. Here is the whole problem explained for those who don't get it. Sony, like many other japanese TV makers, has too many plants and overproduces TVs that are too expensive. They also have a building full of employees that are part of the TV selling business group. Now in America, the solution is always the same : Fire the employees and shut down the plants as needed, within 15 minute's notices. In Japan, it is completely impossible to fire people (technically you can, but you have to pay their salaries until retirement. This has lead to an institution called "window jobs"). Combine that with a foreigner as ceo (Stringer, whose underlings seem to have apparently worked against him as rumours are fircling around), Sony has, in the past years, fired every person and plant they could _outside_ of Japan (the console group in my country is history in a few weeks from now, so this is still going on). At this point, Sony is pretty much stripped bare outside of Japan. Enter Kaz Hirai, the Uebermensch as some think here he is, and guess what - not even Kaz has any solutions to the fundamental problem. There is no Kaz Superplan. I'm with Kowenicki this time (rare occasion I should add), Hirai is just buying time for himself by selling the table silver, and hoping that the problem slowly goes away over the next years while burning through the money for the two buildings (5000 employees means about 150-250 employees less per year through retirement and other causes). In the end, I see for the first time a Japanese company gutting Japanese plants and firing Japanese employees wholesale, because Sony does not have enough table silver to hunger through the losses (mainly from the TV business).
