Eclipsed by Apple

摘要

For Sony it was a bittersweet moment. On July lst the firm bid a final farewell to its Vaio personal computers, a global brand which won such a devoted following after its launch in 1996 that the late Steve Jobs, a fan of Sony in its glory days, once asked to equip it with his Apple Mac operating system. Cut off from its parent, Vaio is floundering. Since Sony announced its sale to a Japanese private-equity fund, in February, it has suffered a slump in its market share in Japan to just 2%, down from 10% at the start of 2014. The vertiginous drop will have dismayed Sony, which had kept a tiny stake in the business. However, investors have put Sony's bosses under pressure to do something about the company's chronically poor performance. It has lost money in five of the past six years and is forecasting a further loss in the year to March 2015.