Reporter | Peng Xin
Former Sony chairman and CEO Nobuyuki Izui died of liver failure on June 2 at the age of 84. On June 7, Sony Group issued a statement announcing the news.
Nobuyuki Izui was born in Tokyo to the son of Moriyuki Ioi, a renowned professor of economics at Waseda University in Japan, and the son-in-law of Sony co-founder Inoue Daisuke. After graduating from the Faculty of Political Economy at Waseda University in 1960, Nobuyuki Izumi joined Sony in the same year, where he served as director of the audio business and director of the Advertising and Publicity Department. In 1995, Nobuyuki Izui became president, IN 1998 as CEO, and from 2000 to 2005 as Chairman and CEO of Sony. In 2005, he stepped down as president and CEO, and in 2006 founded Quantum Leaps as CEO of Quantum Leaps.
As a controversial leader in Sony's history, Nobuyuki Izui led the company's transformation from an electrical appliance company to a platform company, leading Sony's digital reform, which is still underway today. But because of the sluggish performance of Sony's home appliance business and the collapse of the stock price later in his career, he was held accountable, and eventually resigned. His naming of British-American Howard Stringer as his successor, becoming the first foreign leader in Sony's history, was extremely rare at the time and sparked heated discussion.
Unlike former Sony business leaders such as Daisuke Inoue, Akio Morita, and Norio Oga, Nobuyuki Dei is not a start-up from Tokyo Communications Industries (the predecessor of Sony). It was also because of his early experience in Europe to expand into international markets that he developed a love of western lifestyles, which was out of place with other Executives from Sony's homegrown background.
His ascension also broke sony's personnel arrangement of alternating technical and transactional leaders. The reason for winning the favor of Norio Ka, the then head of Sony, was due to the fact that between 1993 and 1994, Nobuyuki Izui submitted a report on "The Future of Sony" three times.
What these three reports show is that Nobuyuki Izui realized that the advent of the era of computer networking has brought great challenges to the electrical giant Sony. Sony is good at manufacturing tape drives, televisions, video cameras and other audio and video products, and it is difficult to maintain the high profitability of hardware in the Internet era, so he advocates that the company's audio and video products need to integrate computer technology to expand the source of revenue.
At the age of 58, Nobuyuki Izumi was hand-picked by Nobuo Oga as his successor and was expected to "let Sony continue to shine".
Shinyuki Izui, who accidentally bypassed a number of senior executives to take the helm of Sony, took over a company that was heavily indebted: 3.99 trillion yen in revenue, but 1.9 trillion yen in debt due to the previous acquisition of Columbia Pictures.
He described Sony's huge debt crisis as "on the brink of bankruptcy" at the time, with a survival rate of less than 50 percent and the company in dire need of change.
During his tenure as president, Nobuyuki Dei shouted the slogan "Digital Dream Kids" (Digital Dream Kids). "Mr. Inoue is a transistor kid, Mr. Morita is a Walkman kid, Mr. Ohga is a CD kid, and we have to be a digital dream kid." This is nobuyuki Izui's best-known manifesto.
Nobuyuki Izui stressed that Sony should embrace the Internet era and be a leader in the network society, hoping to integrate audio-visual products and IT technology, and launched its own VAIO personal computer in 1996 to increase investment in the PlayStation game business. Nobuyuki Dei also expanded Sony's film, television, and music businesses, and entered financial services such as banks.
In the ten years since Nobuyuki Izui took over the baton from Nobuo Oga, Sony's business situation has been good. In the late 1990s, the introduction of new products such as the PlayStation console and the VAIO personal computer enabled Sony to maintain global sales revenue and profit growth during the period of total economic stagnation in Japan.
Under his leadership, Sony gradually shifted its business focus from consumer electronics products to the development of the game and entertainment markets. At that time, the aftershocks of the bursting of the Japanese economic bubble were still in the air, and the company was in mourning, and Sony was the only survivor.
But in the millennium, this trend has not continued. Nobuyuki Izui's crisis of trust began in 2003, when the Sony crisis began to emerge due to the loss of LCD panel technology for televisions. In April of that year, Sony announced the company's financial year 2002 results. Sales in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2002 fell 12 percent, with a quarterly net loss of 111.1 billion yen ($926 million), triggering a sharp drop in the stock price. By February 2004, Sony predicted a 30 percent decline in operating profit in the previous fiscal quarter to a nine-year low, triggering a "Sony shock" in which the Nikkei plunged.
In May 2004, Nobuyuki Izui announced his company's renovation plan in Tokyo, vowing to lead Sony's transformation again, planning to invest 1 trillion yen over the next three years to develop high-speed network services, chips, and other technologies. Sony's goal at the time was to complete the restructuring of its business as quickly as possible, ensuring that by fiscal year 2006, the company's 60th anniversary, its operating profit would reach at least 10%.
But the reform lasted only a year, and under pressure from shareholders, Nobuyuki Izui handed over management to Howard Stringer, who was in charge of U.S. operations. Subsequently, Nobuyuki Izui withdrew from the board of directors along with two other members, and Sony's "Era of Nobuyuki Izui" came to an end.
The outside world has mixed opinions about Sony's "Era of Nobuyuki Dei". Unfortunately, during Nobuyuki Ioi's tenure as Sony CEO, Sony not only ceded the leading position in the field of music players to Apple, but also defeated Japanese competitors and Korean companies in the field of television. Even Sony Ericsson, a joint venture mobile phone company he founded in 2001 while he was CEO of Sony, once the world's third-largest mobile phone brand, then fell into a long-term recession.
But he also shaped Sony's current appearance, and Nobuyuki Izui promoted the development of Sony's digital and communication fields, while focusing on entertainment businesses such as movies, music, and game consoles, laying the foundation for sony now. Kenichiro Yoshida, President of Sony Group, said: "Mr. Dei has long foreseen the impact of the Internet, and his foresight to promote digitalization is still amazing. For two years from 1998, I served as the head of the President's Office under Mr. Deoi, where my experience and learning contributed to the current operation of Sony. ”
After retiring from Sony, Nobuyuki Izui founded Quantum Leaps, a technology consulting firm, to help companies promote reform and cultivate technology-driven startups. On the Quantum Leaps website, Nobuyuki Izui said that "the world is in the midst of a power shift from the Atlantic Ocean centered on Europe and the United States to the Pacific Ocean centered on Asia, and Japan must establish complementary co-creation relations with other countries, including Asia, rather than competition, and achieve qualitative growth." ”
Nobuyuki Izui is a frank man and has been evaluated as "the least Japanese entrepreneur." He once said that people can graduate or retire from an organization, but people can't say goodbye to themselves. Sony, the most famous brand company in Japan, is ultimately inseparable from Nobuyuki Izui.
During the Sony debt crisis of the Oga Norio era, Nobuyuki Izumi, who wanted to become an economist within the company, thought to himself: "Whoever comes to be the general manager will be very hard." Unexpectedly, in a word, the object of this inner sympathy was actually himself.