TOKYO — Sony is selling its Vaio computer brand, spinning off its TV business and entering new sectors to revive its electronics and entertainment empire, its chief executive said on Thursday, promising an end to troubles that have long bedeviled the once-iconic manufacturer and fueled calls for its breakup.
Sony, the maker of PlayStation game consoles and Bravia televisions, expects its sixth annual loss in seven years this year, hurt by mounting restructuring costs, and is slashing about 5,000 jobs.
Still, that restructuring could finally set the groundwork for the company's turnaround, chief executive Kazuo Hirai said at a management briefing in Tokyo.
Meanwhile, Sony hopes to get into new businesses like wearable technology, batteries and medical equipment.
"If we cannot follow through on what needs doing this year and provide results, we can't develop a midterm strategy," Mr. Hirai said. "We will not postpone this structural reorganization."
The company said it would aim for an operating profit of 400 billion yen, or about $4 billion, in the 2015-16 fiscal year, Reuters reported.
Analysts and investors have said that to reverse its fortunes, Sony needs to go even further.
The billionaire activist investor Daniel S. Loeb last year urged Sony to spin off part of its entertainment unit, which includes movies and music, to allow the company to focus on its electronics arm.
Sony rejected that proposal, saying both sides of its business were central to its future success. In the nine months since, Sony shares have slumped 15 percent.
Some analysts have gone so far as to say Sony needs to shed its consumer electronics business to climb back to profit.
"Electronics remains Sony's Achilles' heel," Atul Goyal, a technology analyst at Jefferies, said in a research note this month.
Mr. Hirai, who took the helm at the company in 2012, has shown that he may be willing to go further than his predecessors to cut Sony's sprawling operations down to size. He said in February that Sony would sell off its struggling Vaio personal computer line, the manufacturer's first exit from a major consumer product area.
But a major drag on Sony's bottom line comes from its television business, which has been battered by cheaper offerings from South Korean rivals like Samsung and LG. But Mr. Hirai has been loath to pull the plug on televisions, which were central to Sony's ascendance in the 1990s and early 2000s.
More than anything, analysts say, Sony needs a hit product. Its new video game console, the PlayStation 4, has been something of a success, selling more than seven million units since it first went on sale in November.
But its gaming division still lost money last year, thanks to the heavy costs associated with introducing the console.
The video game industry as a whole has also struggled to counter the rise of downloadable smartphone games.
Sony's XPeria smartphones, meanwhile, have failed to make a dent in a market dominated by Apple's iPhones and Samsung's Galaxy line.
The Tokyo-based Sony expects a net loss of ¥50 billion in the year through March 2015. In the last fiscal year, it lost ¥128 billion.
Sony's engineers have not given up on regaining its technological cutting edge, however.
In March, the company unveiled a prototype of a virtual reality headset for its PlayStation 4, which it said would immerse the wearer in an interactive world.
Sony is still committed to developing technology "that people don't expect or think possible," Shuhei Yoshida of Sony's gaming arm told reporters at the project's unveiling at a Los Angeles trade show.
"As we strengthen our entertainment and financial operations, we will implement the transformation of our core electronics areas to endure growth from 2015 on," Mr. Hirai said.
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