Reuters and other national news agencies reported Sony Corp. is undergoing a restructuring process
that will consolidate various business segments and lay off 10 percent of the company’s work force.
But according
to U.S.-based employees, the measure will not affect the company’s wireless product business, which recently
announced new mobile phone handsets and paging devices.
Sony’s U.S. Personal Mobile Communications division
went through a minor restructuring of its own recently in the form of an upper management shuffle. The most recent
installment was that of new President Tedao Cubodera, formerly president of Sony’s U.S. television division, who
joined the division Feb. 1.
Before Cubodera arrived, the business unit welcomed a new vice president of sales in
mid-January, and in November saw a fresh vice president of marketing and senior vice president of
engineering.
Cubodera met with this new management team and reviewed the current product line. The most
significant result of that meeting was the decision to cancel the introduction of an upgraded version of the CMZ100
Zuma pocket phone, expected at Wireless ’99.
According to Gretchen Griswold, public relations manager for the
PMC division, Cubodera felt the existing Zuma model was selling strong and therefore saw no reason to introduce a
competing product.
“They determined there wasn’t enough differentiating factors to continue developing [the
upgraded phone],” Griswold said of the new model.
The CMZ100 has been available for about a year, and
sales for the device had been slow. However, Sony said sales have begun to pick up. According to Griswold, now there
are plans to re-introduce a newer model.
Instead, the company is reinforcing its support of the existing phone, as
well as the recently announced CMZ200 dual-mode analog/Code Division Multiple Access 800 MHz
phone.
Griswold said Sony plans to introduce a newer model of its Astra handset line, called the CMSB200, a dual-
band handset that she said is 30 percent lighter and smaller than others in the same product line.
Zuma phones are
the pocket-sized handsets featuring a fold-down mouthpiece while the Astra handsets are shaped more like candy
bars.
Sony also introduced a new paging product, called the MP7001. Sony’s pager manufacturing business is not
part of the wireless handset division. The paging group instead is a unit in Sony’s Personal Audio division.
Spokeswoman Susan Kwan said the reason for this is that upper management feels paging is a radio transmission
technology and should be in the same segment as their personal mobile AM/FM radio products. Griswold added that
Sony wanted its PMC sales force to concentrate on selling to cellular carriers, without any distraction of also selling
other devices to paging carriers.
Kwan said the company’s old MP-2000 and MP-1000 numeric FLEX pagers have
been discontinued. Available instead is the MP7000 alphanumeric pager. At Wireless ’99, Sony also introduced the
MP7001, an alphanumeric FLEX pager with certain advanced features, such as over-the-air programming and
synthesized frequency rather than crystal. Paging Network Inc. is the only paging carrier using the device at this
time.
The 7001 will be available this spring, Kwan said. She said Sony also is working on other new paging
developments, but was unable to discuss the details at this time.
