Digital Journal — If you feel like you’ve been inundated with music players in the last year or so, join the club. It seems that everywhere you look, you see advertisements for the latest portable jukebox, each more miniscule than the last. You see hundreds of people wearing the most popular unisex fashion accessory — bright white earbuds — everywhere you go.
In most circles, iPod is a household name. Since Apple announced the original iPod in October 2001, the sleek gadget has created massive waves in the music player world. The iPod economy has clobbered all its competition with more than 22 million iPods sold to date. Also, with more than 1,000 accessories available, iPod junkies can now carry all sorts of specialized products from high-end fashion cases to speaker systems and car integration kits.
So it’s time to compare apples with, um, Sony. If you haven’t heard already, Sony just recently announced their latest digital music player in Tokyo, and the company hopes the 20 GB MP3 player known as “Walkman” will be an iPod killer. With features such as a sleek oval design, tiny display screen, disk-controlled menus and memory to store 13,000 songs, Sony’s latest Mp3 player is a step up from the ones we’ve seen the company produce to tackle Apple’s baby in the past.
The Walkman, set to be released in Japan on Nov. 19, 2005, is not to be mistaken by the other new Walkman Bean, which will hit North American stores in October this year. The Walkman — not the Bean — will have a release date in Europe and North America hopefully by the end of 2005.
It’s no secret that Sony is now trying to the grab the bull by his horns, so to speak. In the last few months alone, electronic analysts have seen a tug-of-war between Apple and Sony vying for the top position in the music player market.
Sony has also watched its business slide in other areas; Sharp Co. has grown into the world’s largest maker of LCD display TVs, and Sony is struggling to keep pricing competitive against other major manufacturers in North America. The end result: Its business has suffered, and for the first time in years, Sony will be posting losses.
To combat its sinking business, Sony has announced major overhauls in its business strategy, including cutting 10,000 jobs — 7 per cent of its work force — and selling $1 billion in assets such as real estate, stocks, and non-core assets. It will also restructure its company to be more centralized; cut costs by reducing its product models by one-fifth; and focus the company so it can lead the market in televisions, digital imaging, DVD recorders and portable audio.
Sony’s recent announcement of the new MP3 Walkman is just one example of the company’s aggressive approach to go after market leaders like Apple and reclaim the top spot in the tech world.
But the multi-billion dollar question remains: Can Sony revitalize itself and reclaim the position it held 26 years ago when it launched the original Walkman? It sure hopes so.
Sony set an ambitious goal with the launch of this latest version — to sell 4.5 million copies worldwide in the fiscal year ending March 2006. It’s time to take out your calculators: that’s five times the number of older versions of the Walkman sold last fiscal year. Also, it’s still a leap to the 6.2 million iPods that Apple sold in the last three months.
“It’s just the first step,” Koichiro Tsujino, the co-president of the team developing the iPod killer, told reporters at the launch.
Still, analysts are wondering whether Sony stepped into the market too late. It was not until last year that Sony produced a similar product to tackle the iPod. And we have the numbers to prove who the favourite remains:
According to The New York Times and Business Computer News (BCN), Apple holds 40 per cent of the Japanese market for portable music players, as of August 2005. Sony’s share is 16.5 per cent.
The numbers are similar on the other side of the world. The NPD Group, based in North America, says in the last 12 months of the MP3 market, Apple owned 24 per cent of the unit share, while Sony owned 5.4 per cent. In the hard-drive based category — which is where the iPod and new Walkman will fit in — Apple continues to dominate; it owns 80 per cent of the market worldwide.
True, when Sony launched the new Walkman, it tried to cover its bases in comparison to the iPods. In addition to the 20 GB model, available in violet and silver, Sony also developed a 6 GB model in pink and blue, and a 2 GB model that is the size of a cigarette lighter. All models come with colour-coordinated headphones.
However, as fate would have it, Apple launched their “impossibly small” iPod nano in California just hours before Sony made its big announcement in Tokyo last week. The iPod nano can hold more than 1,000 songs or 25,000 photos and is thinner than a standard HB pencil.
With Apple in the white corner, and Sony in the violet corner, the MP3 player fight for supremacy will likely last a tough 12 rounds.
