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Sony and Samsung: Portraits of Two Global Competitors
Digital technology⌠[presents] ⌠the greatest opportunity for those manufacturers who did not have a top market share in the analog world. If they make the correct changes in strategy, they possibly could leap-frog well-entrenched industry leaders.
âSteve F. Smith, Editor-in-Chief, TWICE Magazine
Sony ruled a slower age when it could bring out a new gadget like the Walkman as a luxury item, then gradually lower the price and widen the market over time. Now, since the rise of cheap Asian manufacturing in the 1980s, companies need to bring out a stream of new products that sell immediately at high volume for a relatively low price, and are quickly displaced by the next new thing. Samsung is king of this age.
âNewsweek1
The Fall of Sony and the Rise of Samsung Electronics
A Turning Point
A few years ago, the electronics industry reached a milestone. Sony had long been acknowledged as the worldâs best electronics manufacturer, but in 2002, Sonyâs market capitalization fell below Samsungâs, which had been an obscure memory chip producer not many years ago. Figure 1.1 shows some of the raw data behind this story. By December 2006, Samsungâs market capitalization was $106 billion, an increase of 400% since 2000 and twice that of Sonyâs. Since becoming CEO in 1997, Jong-yong Yun, has become famous for turning Samsung Electronics into one of the most profitable companies in the electronics industry. By contrast, Sonyâs Chairman Nobuyuki Idei and President Kunitake Ando resigned in 2005 and were succeeded by Howard Stringer and Ryoji Chubachi, respectively.
Figure 1.1 The Market Capitalization of Sony and Samsung Electronics
Source: Samsung Securities, Sony Fact Book.
Sony began from a position of strength. The late Chairman Akio Morita had shown the world that Sony had become a global company. Michael Porter, a strategy guru, praised Sony highly as one of the few Japanese companies that actually had a strategy.2
Sonyâs troubles began, however, after it acquired Columbia Pictures in 1989 (see Figure 1.2). Things turned out so bad that by 1994 it had to write off accumulated losses of $3.5 billion. Sony then restructured its entertainment business to control costs. Sonyâs profitability peaked in 1997 when it introduced PlayStation, but started to decline again soon afterward, and sales became stagnant. By contrast, although Samsung Electronicsâ sales and profitability were highly volatile during the late 1990s, its revenue almost doubled between 2000 and 2006, and it had a considerably higher rate of profitability than Sony enjoyed during this period.
Figure 1.2 Sony and Samsung Electronicsâ Sales and Profitability (1991- 2006)
Source: Annual Reports and Earnings Announcement of Sony and Samsung, respectively.
Some of the best evidence of Samsungâs rise and Sonyâs fall appeared in the changing tones of Sonyâs top management whenever they spoke about Samsung. Nobuyuki Idei noted in 2002 that âSamsung found Sony a model or a benchmark for their brand image. The product design and the product planningâthey have learned from us. So Sony is a very good target for them.â To him, Samsung was merely one of the suppliers rather than a potential threat. He continued, âWe still believe that Samsung is basically a component company.â3 Just a year later, Kunitake Ando, president of Sony, mentioned that he asked âfor a report on what Samsung is doing every week.â4 In 2006, Sonyâs newly appointed CEO, Howard Stringer, said that âSamsung is a first-rate company and they have a wealth of revenue coming from other areas. But, I think in the high-definition world, which is clearly our strategy for this year, we still have an advantage.â Sony was now openly acknowledging that Samsung Electronics had now become its competitor.5 Some of the popular press even inflicted the ultimate insult on Sony by commenting that it needed a lesson from Samsung. âAs he looks for inspiration, Stringer might consider taking a page from Samsung Electronics. The Korean company has taken many of the steps that analysts believe Sony needs to take, ranging from collaborating more with partners to doing a better job taking its cues from the market. In doing so, it has become one of the nimblest players in the business.â6
The Media Hype
Sony had once dominated the electronics industry. So why did its fortunes drop so rapidly, just as Samsung was emerging from out of nowhere? The media have speculated about why the fortunes of these two companies changed so rapidly, but their evaluations are usually superficial and focus only on short-term performance. Often, journalists anoint a CEO as a Best Manager one year, only to dub him the Worst Manager just a few years later.
Sony had been nominated as one of the âWorldâs Most Admired Companiesâ by Fortune in 1997, which commented that âSony was voted the most effective Asian company at doing business globally, the best company in Asia at wooing and winning topnotch people, and the most innovative electronics company in the world. Since he took over two years ago, Idei has shaken the place to its foundations, revamping the board of directors, restructuring major divisions, and clamping down on U.S. operationsâespecially Sony Pictures Entertainment.â7 The magazineâs evaluation of Sony and Idei soured, however, soon after the firmâs performance deteriorated. Business Week had nominated Idei as one of the Worldâs Best Managers in 1997 and 1999. But in 2004, the magazine put him on the Worldâs Worst list when he triggered the so-called Sony shock by announcing that the company had suffered a quarterly loss of about $1 billion, which triggered a sell-off of shares, plunging its stock price nearly 25% in two days.
Figure 1.3 Mediaâs Evaluation of Nobuyuki Idei
The most amazing accusation, according to the same magazine, was âIdeiâs later admission that he himself had been caught off guard by the dismal earnings.â8 He was also criticized for failing to move far enough or fast enough in a corporate restructuring program he had announced in 1999 and for not being able to come up with innovative products. âSony has pushed great-looking products made from the same digital components that everyone has. So itâs no surprise that its CD (Compact Disc) players, digital cameras, and other gadgets become commodities almost as soon as they hit the market.â9 While Stringer and Chubachi, the new management team, stopped the hemorrhage by closing down factories and laying off workers, it is not clear whether Sony can regain its reputation as the worldâs most innovative consumer electronics powerhouse.
The media often misread up-and-coming firms. A few years ago, everyone wrote about Samsung Electronics as just one of the many anonymous Asian Original Equipment Manufacturing (OEM) companies that dumped cheap, low-quality products in discount stores. Until recently, it was hard to find an article that was favorable of Samsung Electronics. In an article about the Samsung Group that was written right after the financial crisis in 1998, Business Week described Samsung Electronics as a company that manufactured commodity chips, such as DRAMs (Dynamic Random Access Memory), and had been badly hurt by the Asian crisis and the downturn of the global chip business. âSenior managers have taken a 10% pay cut. Workers can no longer count on such perks as preschool tuition. At headquarters, the thermostat is now set so low that execs wear thermal underwear.â10
But fortunes soon changed. In 1997, Fortune had named Idei as âAsiaâs Businessman of the Year.â But in 1999 it gave the same title to Jong-yong Yun of Samsung Electronics. He was now the man who âused Asiaâs current chaos to reinvent a company that seemed near death.â11 He was also praised for turning âa manufacturer of cheap black-and-white TVs into a $72 billion behemoth that earns more and has a more valuable global brand than archrival Sony.â12
Popular books such as Thomas Peters and Robert Watermanâs In Search of Excellence, Jim Collinsâs Good to Great, and Jim Collins and Jerry Porrasâs Built to Last describe the properties of successful companies as success factors that other firms should emulate.13 But Philip Rosenzweig, author of the Halo Effect, argues that those books merely summarize the characteristics of successful firms; they do not identify true success factors. Managers around the world are constantly looking for magic formulas to improve their bottom line. They find it difficult to resist the temptation to emulate firms like acquisition-savvy Cisco or HP, which does such a good job of cultivating employees. Boards are also looking for a charismatic leader such as Steve Jobs in the hope that he or she will bring tremendous instant success with a product like the iPod. Simply copying a corporate culture, leadership, value system, or strategy does not necessarily lead to success, however; these properties are not themselves the success factors.
Rosenzweig calls the tendency to observe the results first and then rationalize the companyâs strategies the Halo Effect.14 The real challenge is to compare Samsung Electronicsâ and Sonyâs business structures, technology, brands, organizations, and management systems and to explain why these two giants have met with such drastically different fates during the past 10 years.
Comparison of Sony and Samsung Electronics: Motivations and Limitations
Any comparison of Sony and Samsung Electronics will inevitably be inexact. Sony is a significantly older firm. It was born as a start-up company, while Samsung Electronics began as a subsidiary of Samsung Group and shares that groupâs company culture and management system. Further, the missions of these firms were very different. Sony was founded in the early years of post-war Japan and has attempted to make consumersâ lives more convenient by developing and producing innovative products such as the Walkman and the Compact Disc. Samsung Electronics, by contrast, was founded during Koreaâs period of rapid industrialization. It created a long-standing identity as a manufacturer of key parts that are essential to the electronics industry. It lived by slogans like âsemiconductors are the bread of the electronics business,â and âcontribute to the nation by industry.â Moreover, the cultural differences between Japan and Korea add to the distinctions between these two companies.
In addition, Sony and Samsung Electronicsâ key businesses are very different. Sony has devoted significant resources not only to the electronics business but also to music, movies, and software. It also has a B2C (business to customer) business structure, and thus sells mainly to end users. In contrast, although the Samsung Group as a whole is extremely diversified, Samsung Electronics produces and sells parts to other electronics firms, and its product portfolio is centered on the electronics industry. Even its mobile phone business is closer to a B2B (business to business) model than it is to B2C. Samsung Electronics sells its products mainly to a small number of operators.
But despite these important differences, a comparison uncovers valuable insights. First, Sony and Samsung Electronics simultaneously compete and cooperate with each other. They compete in the realms of TVs, DVDs, audio, camcorders, digital cameras, and mobile phones. But they cooperate in the production of LCDs (Liquid Crystal Display) through their S-LCD joint venture. Samsungâs leading LCD technology and Sonyâs expertise in product development help both companies gain competitive advantages against their rivals. Further, Samsung Electronics supplies DRAMs and flash memory to Sony, but it purchases CCDs (Charge Couple Device) and batteries from Sony. Comparing two companies that simultaneously compete and cooperate reveals the overall dynamics of how firms in the electronics industry have responded to common trends.
Second, comparing Sony and Samsung Electronics may shed light on how the performance of different firms may change as they try to adjust to rapid technological developments in the electronics industry and how companies should effectively respond to such changes. Firms like Apple and Hewlett-Packard show how volatile the electronics industry can be. For example, Apple had a near-death experience when its Macintosh lines were marginalized by Windows-based personal computers, only to be resurrected by its unexpected success with iPod. Samsung Electronics and Sony have responded somewhat differently to the rapid digitalization of the electronics industry during the past decade. Sony invested in network technology and attempted to create synergy between hardware and software such as music and film. Samsung Electronics focused on manufacturing core parts. Its CEO Yun has a motto: âStay at the forefront of core technologies and master the manufacturing and you control your future.â15 Sony and Samsung Electronics adopted different strategies as they responded to digitalization. Both strategies have their benefits and shortcomings.
Samsung Electronics and Sony are representative Asian companies, which lead the Korean and Japanese electronics industries. A comparison will reveal important strengths and weaknesses of Asiabased companies. In many cases, these companies are still owned and managed by their founders or foundersâ families. In many cases the transition to professional managers that is typical in Western firms...