Howard Stringer, 63, currently head of Sony's US subsidiary and a former president of CBS News, will replace Sony career man Nobuyuki Idei as chairman and chief executive effective June 22, a Sony statement said.

With a veteran of the media and entertainment fields at the company's helm, Sony also announced that his deputy as chief operating officer would be an engineer, current executive deputy president Ryoji Chubachi.

"We should open up Sony's ideas to another generation within Sony," Stringer said, calling on executives to work harder "with a right kind of aggression and excitement".

Chubachi said there could be "no revival of Sony without a revival of electronics."

Electronics make up 70 percent of Sony's income but sales have continued to slip to the point that Standard and Poor's downgraded the company's credit rating in November.

Sony was a latecomer to the booming digital product market in which rivals such as Panasonic maker Matsushita and Sharp have now become the dominant players. The Walkman inventor has also lagged behind Apple, maker of the iPod, in building a new generation of portable music products.

"There are expectations that Sony will change but considering Sony's tarnished brand image, the new management needs to score a hit with a high-quality product," said Osamu Hirose, senior analyst at Tokyo Tokai Research Center.

Stringer has headed Sony Corp. of America since 1997 and led the Sony group's acquisition last year of Hollywood's Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios.

"We have clearly demonstrated in our US operations that we can achieve significant cross-company efficiencies and at the same time deliver both extraordinary quality and record returns," Stringer said in the statement.

Stringer, who was born in Wales but became a US citizen in 1985, would be the second foreigner tasked with turning around a struggling Japanese giant.

Carlos Ghosn, a Brazilian-born Frenchman, was brought in to run Nissan Motor in 1999 when France's Renault took a controlling interest in the Japanese firm which was billions of dollars in debt and with a plunging market share.

"Ghosn's work had two stages -- first destroy the present structure and then rebuild -- but Sony has already done restructuring to a certain extent," said Mitsuhiro Osawa, analyst at Mizuho Investors.

"What will be required for them (the new Sony management) will be creative talent," he said.

Idei, who is handing over after a decade-long reign, said he had no problem with a foreigner heading the company which was founded in 1946 and boomed as an export-driven economy rebuilt Japan from war.

Of the 150,000 Sony employees, only 50,000 are Japanese and only 29 percent of the group's business takes place in Japan, Idei said.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda, the Japanese government spokesman, also said there was "nothing strange about the appointment."

"Japanese companies are being internationalised one after another with the number of foreigners on their boards rising," Hosoda told a news conference.

Stringer, who began his career as a clerk and then documentary-maker at CBS, was made a Knight Bachelor by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999, allowing his colleagues to call him "Sir Howard."

"I will give Sir Howard full support to achieve the paramount goal of transforming Sony," Chubachi said.

News of the appointment helped push shares in Sony Corp. up by 60 yen or 1.5 percent to 4,070 yen on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Monday, when the benchmark Nikkei-225 index rose 0.44 percent.

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