Sony’s made a lot of money selling TVs over the years. So it’s kind of a shock to the system to hear its CEO Howard Stringer say that it needs to completely overhaul the way it does business in televisions.
Stringer said at a breakfast hosted by the Wall Street Journal that companies had backed themselves into a tough market by racing to gain television marketshare. Their answer is to try to develop some exciting new product — which, like, duh — but the impetus is the especially interesting bit:
“We can’t continue selling TV sets [the way we have been]. Every TV set we all make loses money.”
Losing money on some TVs makes sense; televisions are a notoriously low profit margin category of product. And sometimes they catch on fire and have to be recalled. But all of them? That’s really interesting. And if it’s true for every company, as Stringer claims? Interestinger and interestinger.
And as for the exciting new TV? Here’s hoping it’s Smell-o-Vision. [WSJ]