Sony Resources

| strength | weakness |

Resources | * Japanese corporate culture has generally preferred organic, wholly owned foreign direct investment to the use of international mergers and acquisitions. | |

capability | * “Sony the maverick and most westernised of Japanese companies has been the most pioneering in developing cross-functional American and European organisations and in integrating non-Japanese into top management posts.” Sony tried to delegate as much decision-making as possible to the regional organisations, Sony UK for example reported to Sony Europa; the regional organisation with headquarters in Cologne Germany * Sony would continue to advance non-Japanese to senior management positions | * When such Japanese companies undertook their own international operations, it was often in a very ethnocentric way, with foreign operations centralised and very tightly controlled by the Japanese headquarters. It was felt to be very difficult if foreign operations were decentralised to foreign managers who could not speak Japanese. |

Competence | * The name Sony, adopted in 1957, combined the Latin word for sound: Sonus, with the American expression”sonny-boy” implying youthful exuberance. * Sony established overseas salesrooms in prestigious locations such as Fifth Avenue in New York and the Champs Elysee in Paris, in order to build the image of an upmarket, prestigious brand. * corporate governance terms, was not as concerned with seniority as the Japanese norm * Sony using unusual slogans like “Digital dream kids” and “Do you dream in Sony?” to convey this message of youth, creativity and the digital age. | * Even the Japanese word for internationalisation - kokusaika has a negative connotation and implies the process is problematic. |