Despite fires in San Diego closing its factory there and forcing evacuations of its workers, Sony Electronics says it has now caught up with orders and is expecting a bumper holiday season in the US.
“It could be the best holiday season in the last couple of years,” Stan Glasgow, its president in the US, told us at a press event in San Francisco on Monday night.
His confidence is based on orders from retailers for Sony’s current third quarter and he also expects returns from a $100m marketing campaign in the US.
“You will see more advertising than we have ever done before,” he said. The emphasis will be on High Definition , with Sony’s HDNA campaign prominent.
Sony also showed off the new version of its Sony Reader and an 8Gb Walkman that competes with the iPod Nano. Significantly for Sony, its proprietary Atrac format is gone and it now seems more open format than Apple, with WMA, MP3 and AAC music files supported.
Mr Glasgow said Sony’s announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January would emphasise integration between Sony’s different product lines – a key goal of Sony’s chief executive, Sir Howard Stringer.
His US president was particularly critical of supporters of the HD-DVD standard, which competes with Sony’s Blu-ray DVD players. He said Toshiba and perhaps Wal-Mart had substantially subsidised an HD-DVD player that went on sale for $99 at the retailer last week.
He also claimed that HD-DVD supporters had paid the Hollywood studios as much as $500m in incentives to bring out movies in that format. The studios are also reported to have asked for incentives from Sony and the New York Times reported in August that Paramount and Dreamworks alone had received $150m for choosing HD-DVD over Blu-ray for their releases.
