Howard Stringer

Following Amazon.com's exclusive deal with author Steven Covey, Sony has announced a slew of content deals to populate its Reader Daily Edition e-reader. First, Sony announced a partnership with Dow Jones & Company for exclusive wireless content delivery from The Wall Street Journal and MarketWatch. Next, Sony reached an agreement with the New York Post to exclusively offer the only version of the Post for digital reading devices. Sony also inked non-exclusive deals with more than a dozen additional newspapers, including The New York Times.

Sony's new online service connecting the whole range of its gadgets to downloadable content like movies and games should help build brand loyalty, a top executive said Friday.

Executive Vice President Kazuo Hirai said the service, set for launch next year, highlights an advantage that Sony has over rivals like Samsung Electronics Co. and other manufacturers that don't produce their own content. Sony's business empire spans gaming, electronics, movies and music.

Sony Ericsson is shaking things up with executive changes. The management shake-up at the London-based company comes as mobile-phone businesses struggle to make a profit.

Bert Nordberg, executive vice president of the Ericsson Group and a leader at Ericsson Silicon Valley, will share co-president duties with current President Hideki Komiyama, beginning Sept. 1. Nordberg will take full control of the company as president on Oct. 15 and Komiyama will retire at the end of the year.

Hard times are forcing Sony CEO Howard Stringer to give up his Mr. Nice Guy act. The Welsh-born American executive, who has used charm and wit to sell the rank and file on a modest reform agenda, is suddenly ramming through more drastic measures. That's because evaporating consumer demand and a sharp surge in the yen have left the Japanese tech giant no better off than it was when Stringer started three and a half years ago.

Sony is expected to post its first annual loss in 14 years and is cutting more than 2,000 full-time jobs and closing one of its two Japanese TV plants in Aichi Prefecture, in western Japan, according to Japanese business newspaper Nikkei.

Sony CEO Howard Stringer is expected to announce the cits amd plant closing at a news conference Thursday, according to the newspaper.

While the nation's top three automobile giants are trying to convince the government that they need a bailout, other businesses are doing what they can to stay afloat even if it means slashing thousands of positions.

Today, Sony joined the growing list of companies who have had to cut a percentage of their workforce to stay competitive. Sony announced Tuesday that it will slash 8,000 positions between now and March 2010 in its electronics business, cut operation costs, and cut inventory.

Sony Corp. Chairman Howard Stringer believes the company doesn't need to lower the price of the PlayStation 3 video-game console in response to a possible $50 cut in the Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox 360.

A price reduction by Microsoft would be evidence the Xbox 360 is falling behind in the contest for sales, Stringer said in an interview Friday at the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

Chief Executive Howard Stringer said Sony Corp. will win back its electronic leadership by improving its Internet-linked gadgets, wiping out losses in video games and TVs and pushing services and software, not just hardware.

"This is not your father's Sony," he said Thursday at Sony's Tokyo headquarters, outlining a strategy for growth.