After a decade of struggle, the year 2011 was
supposed to be a comeback year for Sony."And I
did, but in the wrong way." Instead of a banner year, 2011 produced a
near-perfect storm of environmental calamities
for Sony. For starters, in March 2011, eastern
Japan was devastated by a mammoth earth-
quake and tsunami. The disaster forced Sony
to shutter 10 plants, disrupting operations and
the flow of Sony products worldwide. In April,
a hacking attack on the company's Internet
entertainment services-- the second-largest
online data breach in U.S. history-forced the
company to shut down its PlayStation Net-
work. Only four months later, fires set by rioters
in London destroyed a Sony warehouse and
an estimated 25 million CDs and DVDs, gut-
ting an inventory of 150 independent labels. To round out the year, floods in Thailand shut
down component plants there. When the rubble was cleared, Sony's
projected $2 billion profit ended up as a
$3.1 billion loss -- the largest in 16 years. That
loss marked a three-year streak of losses that
had begun with yet another environmental
upheaval -the Great Recession and global
financial meltdown of 2008. In mid-2012,
Sony's shell-shocked new CEO, Kazuo Hirai,
spoke out publicly about Sony's "sense of
crisis," projecting yet another annual loss in
excess of a billion dollars.Not only was it the world's larg-
est consumer electronics company, its history
of innovative products- such as Trinitron TVs,
Walkman portable music players, Handycam
video recorders, and PlayStation video game
consoles-had revolutionized entire industries.Samsung
overtook Sony as the world's largest consumer
electronics maker nearly a decade ago.Likewise, Apple
has pounded Sony with one new product