Stringer, 63, jets in from his US base this week to a plush Tokyo hotel where he will unveil Thursday his plan to revive the business after its first back-to-back quarterly losses in four years.

Whether his strategy will be quite as dramatic as Sony's decision to hand the helm to a former television journalist who speaks no Japanese and has little hands-on experience in consumer electronics remains to be seen.

At the company's annual general meeting in June, Stringer was asked by a shareholder about his proficiency in Japanese. He replied that he was a foreigner "but first and foremost I am a Sony warrior".

Welsh-born Stringer, or "Sir Howard" as he is known since being knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999, may already be sharpening his knives.

Analysts say further cost cuts seem inevitable but the Welsh-American must also help Sony recapture some of the energy and innovation that seem to have waned in recent years, marrying its strengths in electronics and entertainment.

The company is considering floating its financial unit but has denied reports it is planning to sell the subsidiary, as well as a stake in a satellite broadcaster, in a move that could lead to substantial layoffs.

Sony's meteoric rise began almost 60 years ago in Japan's bombed-out capital when Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka founded a company to repair damaged radios.

Its first product was a rice-cooker. It then brought the world the transistor radio, Walkman, Handycam, PlayStation and myriad other gadgets, becoming a global icon and symbol of Japan's post-war technological might.

Nowadays Sony, which employs over 150,000 people worldwide, 50,000 in Japan, is also known for movies and music, but it still relies on electronics for 70 percent of its whopping 67 billion dollars in annual sales.

This is also the area in most urgent need of attention from Stringer who will be joined on Thursday by Sony's president Ryoji Chubachi and chief financial officer Nobuyuki Oneda.

"What the market is hoping is that they clearly show concrete steps to improve their electronics business," said Mitsuhiro Osawa, an analyst at Mizuho Investors Securities.

"Sony's previous business plan seemed to focus on costs and less on the product line-up," he said.

Intense price competition and loss of market share to rivals in lucrative sectors such as televisions has left Sony's core electronics business mired in loss for the past two financial years.

So Stringer's appointment was greeted in Japan not just with disbelief but also with an uneasy acceptance that something had to change at Sony.

The only other foreign executive to head a major Japanese company was Carlos Ghosn, the Brazilian-born Frenchman brought in to turn around Nissan Motor in 1999 when France's Renault took a controlling interest in the debt-laden automaker.

Stringer, previously head of Sony's US subsidiary, is expected to adopt a two-pronged strategy, squeezing costs while also trying to boost revenue, not to mention improving communication between the company's warring fiefdoms.

In 2003 his predecessor Nobuyuki Idei announced 20,000 job cuts over three years as part of a "Transformation 60" plan to trim costs and put its media, entertainment and electronics units on the same path ahead of its 60th birthday in 2006.

Stringer told reporters here in June that "cost-cutting and axing (jobs) are not solutions of all problems."

Cost-cutting was one thing "but growth is even more vital," he said.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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