Author 丨 North Shore
Responsible editor 丨 Cui Liwen
Edit 丨 Chic
There is a story circulating in the jianghu.
In his early years, Jobs was a fan of Sony founder Akio Morita, and he went to Japan many times to ask him for management advice. To what extent did he worship his idols? When Apple released the iMac, Jobs even wanted to name the product Macman, in honor of Sony's popular Walkman.
Akio Morita once gave Jobs a latest Walkman, which made Joe's boss very excited, and he studied it for several days. Later, Under the leadership of Jobs, Apple launched the world-famous iPod, a subversive design that directly ended the golden age of Walkman.
Times change, one time at a time.
Although Waikman's golden age ended with rivals such as Apple, it was the Japanese giant itself that sent away Sony's glorious years. Entering the twenty-first century, the Toei giant ushered in the peak of the market value of $138 billion in 2000, and then it was a stall of prosperity and decline, gradually dimming in the former strongest consumer electronics field, and the long-term loss crack shocked the industry, and even once on the verge of bankruptcy in previous years.
Sony's road to self-help is not easy.
After the global financial crisis, Sony underwent structural reforms internally, spun off the television business, and sold the personal computer and battery business. At present, Sony has integrated its business into the six major sectors of consumer electronics, semiconductors, games, music, movies and finance, and the next core business that is related to fate is the automobile in the period of once-in-a-century change.
To be fair, if it were not for the fact that it was not mired in losses and could not get out, Sony today may have become a "senior player" in the automotive industry. Strictly speaking, the Japanese giant first entered the automotive-related business around 2010, riding on the demand for in-vehicle cameras, Sony also began to develop image sensors for cars, and commercialized this business in 2014.
Just as Sony's half-foot was ready to step into the automotive industry, the financial bubble and the global economic crisis began to hit its main business hard, and in the six years from 2008, the company even accumulated a final deficit of up to one trillion yen, and the only profitable year in 2012 was to be able to return the capital chain by selling the building. Then Hirai Kazuo was killed, but the hot potato finally let it shine again, and Sony slowly eased up after the difficulties, but in the end missed the best window for the rise of smart phones.
The current head, Kenichiro Yoshida, is from a financial background, and since assuming the new position of Sony, he has been committed to business structure reform and the reorganization of capital relations. As Kazuo Hirai's successor, the tech industry has defined him as the man who kept the mountain after Sony's recovery for years.
But under the great wave of change, the burden on his shoulders is not much easier than that of his predecessor, and the automobile business is the hardest bone to gnaw.
01 Origins: A private conversation between two people
Sony's exploration of entering the electric vehicle business, which originally dates back to 2017, and the internal conversations between two key people —
Hiroki Toshiki, currently Sony's Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, is a long-time loyal fan of President Kenichiro Yoshida and the right hand man in management, and was the head of Sony's mobility subsidiary; Izumi Kawanishi, Sony's managing director and executive vice president, previously co-ordinated Sony's AI robot business, is one of the core executives of Sony's technology school.
"What is the essence of a once-in-a-century change?"
At a cross-departmental group meeting, Yuki tossed this issue related to automotive transformation to Izumi Kawanishi, the head of the artificial intelligence project. Kawanishi thought for a moment and introduced the topic to the importance of software to automobile manufacturing: "I think that the construction logic of automobiles will shift from traditional machinery to electronics and electrical in the future, which is controlled by software, but isn't this what we Sony has always had?" ”
It can be seen that software-defined vehicles ( Software Defined Vehicle ) , an industry hot word that is frequently discussed by everyone, has appeared in sony's high-level dialogue five years ago. At that time, Kawanishi Quan was very convinced that the future car would become a "mobile smart phone", and the key to mastering the success of the business would no longer be hardware, but software-level things, but this forward-looking view, he did not further discuss with other company executives.
So, how do you get your tickets?
Kawanishi Izumi told Hiroki that what Sony needs to focus on trying is not electric vehicles, but "mobility", which means that electric vehicles are just a carrier.
According to Sony's plan, Kawanishi Izumi's team will work on the research and development of aibo artificial intelligence robots in early 2018, and the focus of the project is the innovative combination of mobility and AI, about Sony's new exploration of mobility, Kawanishi Izumi naturally thinks of more possibilities in the automotive field.
Sony cars also come with aibo genes.
Kawanishi later recalled that the conversation with Hiroki ten o'clock had planted a seed for Sony to build a car, and the communication between the two was very secretive, and even the best Personal Japanese media reporters had not revealed it to the outside world. Also after 2017, Sony executives tried to use electric vehicles to create a "new brain" for mobile travel, although the matter of car manufacturing was once questioned at the group level, but the decision-making level still arranged a secret team to explore the way in the early stage -
The leader of the team is Chuanxi Quan, and the main member is the aibo artificial intelligence research and development team he brought out, including not only cloud computing and AI software developers, but also engineers in the mechanical and semiconductor fields who joined later.
Changing mobility through electric vehicles, Kenichiro Yoshida, the head of Sony, agrees with Kawanishi's idea that Sony has the advantages of sensors, cloud computing, acoustic technology, and 5G, which are indispensable to the electric vehicle business, which is a vast new land that can extend more possibilities for automotive entertainment and future travel.
02 Temptation: Undecided
Sony has been spying on the potential market of the automotive industry for many years, and we may as well sort out the company's exploration in the automotive field over the years.
Phase I, 2017-2019.
Back in 2017, Sony released the SC-1, an electric concept car in the shape of a square box, but Sony said that it was a pilot vehicle, and the original design was only to explore new mobility; two years later, Sony announced plans to mass-produce the SC-1 for leisure or amusement vehicles. However, because the car is quite different from the real passenger car, it has not attracted much attention.
Phase II, 2020-2021.
At the CES 2020 exhibition site, Sony released the pure electric concept car Vision-S EV, because Sony China's official Weibo also synchronized the copy of "come on, try to test the driver's license", so that the speculation of "Sony to build a car" was once very popular in the car circle. In December of the same year, Sony launched public road tests in Europe around the commercialization of technologies such as human-machine interface systems.
Then in 2021, Sony opened the lid of the dish "car", and let the outside world feel Sony's determination to cook this dish. At the 2022 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Sony unveiled a new concept SUV called VISION-S 02, and not only that, the company's CEO Kenichiro Yoshida also announced that it will open a new division independently, Sony Mobility, which plans to complete the formation work in the spring of 2022.
Kenichiro Yoshida not only revealed a series of expectations for preparing to build a car at this year's CES site, but also told the company's management at an internal meeting before leaving for the United States that building a car was "really something he wanted to do" in his plan, because it could tap the greater value of new mobility.
Some Sony executives revealed that because of the epidemic, in fact, the company has always been cautious about participating in CES, but the enthusiasm of Kenichiro Yoshida as the head of the company eventually overwhelmed the opposition of the leadership.
The third stage is 2022 to the present. But in fact, the two stages from 2017 to 2021 are the "tentative" stages of Sony's car manufacturing, when Sony is not yet clear how to develop and produce cars.
On the one hand, there is funding.
Autonomous driving and electrification are veritable cash-burning pits, and the cost of development alone is overwhelming. According to the DATA OF ALIX Partners, the current manufacturing cost of each electric vehicle is $18,000, which is 2.6 times that of gasoline vehicles, and it is already difficult for automakers to balance their income and expenditure, let alone make money with electric vehicles.
On the other hand, there is the business model.
Since Kenichiro Yoshida took charge of Sony, he has been working on business structure reform and the reorganization of capital relations to make the new Sony easier to manage and operate, but looking back at the giant's cross-border history of involvement in music and financial businesses, they are still known for their good use of joint ventures in The Nippon Trading Company. So, is the car project operated independently, or is it injected with new capital to cooperate with others in depth?
There are also problems with mass production.
Japanese media revealed that as early as ten o'clock When Yuki and Kawanishi Izumi began to exchange car-making possibilities, the production capacity dilemma became the most discussed topic within Sony. Also just in 2018, Tesla is in the "capacity hell", spending $100 million a week to promote the production capacity of Model 3, which makes Sony executives who eat melons next to them very surprised, how can Sony cross the high wall of production capacity?
Finally, there is the profit model.
There are two main paths to the electrification strategy of the automotive industry, one is to focus on the entry-level, to achieve scale effects with small profits and high sales, and the other is to start from medium and high-end models or SUVs, which is one of the shortcuts to maximize the profit of bicycles. As a latecomer to the new car-making force, how does Sony make the electric vehicles it sells profitable?
03 Inflection Point: Embrace Honda
"If we lose the race because of speed, we can't be the front-runners on this road." Kenichiro Yoshida is very clear that in the past, because of speed and positioning, Sony missed the opportunity to compete with Apple in the field of smartphones, and now in the face of cars with higher moats, speed and timing are directly related to the future development trend. After all, Sony is already a latecomer in the army of new car manufacturers.
In recent years, Sony has indeed been very "entangled".
Insiders familiar with Sony have revealed that company executives have been watching every important node of Dyson's car because the company has too many similarities with Sony in terms of business structure. Unexpectedly, Dyson's car-making plan was limited by cost and financial pressure, and years of hard work were in vain, which really made sony management who studied opponents a little panicked.
It's 2022.
This is an important inflection point for Sony to build cars, and it is also from this year that Sony has officially entered the third stage of the electric vehicle business, and the internal strategic path has gradually become clear.
One is to confirm the asset-light route.
Kenichiro Yoshida has been walking between parts suppliers and automakers, trying to explore the possibility of cooperation with more companies, even its concept car Vision S-02 is "eat a hundred meals" molding, and the list of suppliers behind it includes Magna, who is responsible for OEM, and companies such as Bosch, NVIDIA and Continental, which participated in the design. In the end, it was concluded that the most suitable model for Sony was OEM and took the asset-light route.
The other is to embrace Honda.
In March, Honda and Sony planned to form a joint venture in 2022, with the goal of launching a new all-electric car in 2025. Prior to this, Sony set up a mobile mobility company (Sony Mobility Inc),not only absorbed the AI robot business previously led by Kawanishi Izumi, but also attracted a large number of external talents to join, Kenichiro Yoshida revealed that more than half of the R & D staff have experience in the automotive industry.
Why Honda?
According to an interview with Kenichiro Yoshida, the olive branch was thrown out by Toshihiro Mibu, President of Honda, who was very enthusiastic about finding Kenichiro Yoshida and suggested that the two companies each send a special team of young backbones.
From the decision to establish a deeper cooperative relationship at the end of 2021, to march before the official announcement of the hand-in-hand, Honda and Sony have conducted more than 5 in-depth negotiations, and in less than half a year, the dust has settled.
Behind the "fast" is anxiety. At present, Sony and Honda have a very strong sense of crisis, both companies are lagging behind competitors in the innovation and promotion of the electric vehicle business, and in Honda, together with Sony, with the strong personal will of the three toshihiro -
Honda executives have quietly revealed to the Japanese media that the new head of Mibu Minhong "gritted his teeth" at the slow progress of the company's electrification, and repeatedly criticized the management at the company's general meeting for perfunctory calls, which made him once doubt that the plan of "stopping the sale of fuel vehicles in 2040" was difficult to achieve.
At the end of 2021, he personally supervised the establishment of the "Electrification Business Promotion Office" that reported directly to him, and later, dissatisfied with the company's execution, he upgraded it to the "Business Development Headquarters" from April 22 to a position at the same level as the Four Wheel Business Headquarters and the Motorcycle Division.
Toshihiro Mibe is a representative of Honda's technical flow and a reformer who embraces new changes in the company, and he has always had a firm view in his heart.
He believes that the protagonist of the transformation of the automotive industry is shifting to cross-industry players and startups that dare to think and dare to do it, which directly determines the speed of cooperation with Sony, and wants to see the chemical reaction of different industries, and Sony, which belongs to the Japanese camp, has become the best choice.
04 Success or Failure: The Last Chance to Revive the Empire
Sony was Japan's first "new car-making force."
This is also one of the reasons why the heat of the Sony car-making incident continues. Many readers may wonder why the new car-making forces in recent years have concentrated in China and the United States, and Japan, a manufacturing power with no inferior fundamental strength, has never been able to appear a "new species" as eye-catching as Tesla or "Wei Xiaoli".
Interestingly, Nihon Keizai Shimbun recently planned a series of articles with the theme of "Hualiu EV", which included the new forces of Chinese car manufacturing represented by "Wei Xiaoli", Huawei Baidu's advance into the smart car track, and the electrification transformation of traditional car companies such as SAIC Dongfeng.
In the past, China's independent automobiles regarded Japan as the research and development standard, and even exchanged technology for the market in the early days, but they did not expect to enter a new round of competition in the new four modernizations, but we became the object of key research next door.
Can Sony get back to the top by building cars?
Lateral comparison, the entry time is a bit late.
At the beginning of the year, a Sony executive told the Japanese reporter that the company's internal "enthusiasm for the concept car released was not high", until the cooperation with Honda was nailed, and the whole team had the motivation to rush forward.
According to the two companies' plans for joint venture mass production models, the first new car will not be available until 2025 at the earliest, which has indeed lost the market opportunity in the field of electric vehicles that have been seriously "rolled in" and have overcapacity, because the vast majority of competitors have completed the climbing period in product positioning, supply chain integration and sales channel construction.
Japan also lacks soil for cross-border car building.
Japan's own electrification industry chain is not strong, the top half of the suppliers in the battery field are occupied by the Chinese legion, the rest is divided by South Korea's Samsung, LG Chem and SK innovation, Japan is only a Panasonic single wood is difficult to support; the chip semiconductor field is Taiwan, the United States and South Korea's world, which has led to Japan in recent years has been looking forward to TSMC and other giants to set up factories in Japan, but most of the links in the chip industry chain have fallen behind.
Behind this, it has a lot to do with Japan's conservatism. For example, Panasonic, as the "only seedling" of Japanese lithium batteries, has been hesitant in important decisions such as building factories in Europe and building production capacity with Tesla in previous years because of the lack of forward-looking perspective, watching competitors set up camps in foreign countries and occupying the "near-water building platform".
For another example, the Japanese government is also wavering in the electrification process, and the specific technical path and the time node of the final "decarbonization" have been delayed in giving a firm answer.
Previously, a number of Japanese battery manufacturers and chip agents directly said that unless the government proposes a clear industrial route and formulates a clear consumption stimulus policy, it is difficult for them to make up their minds to increase production in the field of innovation.
Finally, Sony Honda is not deeply bound.
Why is Honda and GM strongly related?
The United States is Honda's largest profit cow, the importance of the market is self-evident, the first thing Minhong did after the release of the "alliance strategy" is to deepen the alliance with Detroit giant General Motors, directly using the United States as a test field for industrial alliances.
From the perspective of cooperation, from the early hydrogen fuel cell vehicle new generation system, lithium-ion battery and automatic driving and other fields, and then to the current pure electric vehicle based on the Aoteneng electric platform, the binding of the two companies is three-dimensional and multi-dimensional.
We can't predict what extensions of sony-Honda's alliance model will be at this stage, but whether it is strategic importance, or the technical and business level of interest bundling, it is difficult for us to find Sony's irreplaceability and high interest return for Honda.
In the past ten years, Sony, which has worked hard to save itself in the quagmire of losses, has slowly shifted from the front of the stage to the backstage, the cash flow has been preserved, and the business composition has returned to a relatively healthy state, but it has lost the courage and majesty of "waving the square" in the past standing in front of the curtain of the times.
Now stepping into the torrent of car-making, putting itself on a new label of challenging mobility, Sony behind the scenes has once again gone to the foreground -
Sony is still good, but the empire is no more.
The underlying logic of car manufacturing is very different from all of Sony's previous core businesses, and it is vital to Sony's development in the next decade or even decades.
Kenichiro Yoshida tries to revive the former Sony Empire with a new car-making carrier, but it is no less difficult than Hirai Kazuo saving Sony from fire and water.