The problem is that none of this is new. For every good bet Sony makes, they make three very bad ones that they find it difficult to recover from. Sony’s stock and the company’s brand itself has been in freefall for quite sometime. While we can thank Sony for popularizing such staples as the CD, DVD, and PlayStation, they haven’t been able to do that next big thing that wowed everyone. In the early 2000's Sony’s stock was at it’s highest thanks to DVD and their own PlayStation 2 being the cheapest DVD player on the market at the time at $300. Every since then, every dip in their stock price correlates with major events in the tech and entertainment space that they have recovered from less and less each time. In late 2001 the Apple iPod and Microsoft Xbox threatened two of their key businesses causing the stock to drop. By 2003, it was painfully clear that the Sony Minidisc, Discern, and Sony’s MP3 players were losing to the rising star of Apple’s iPod resulting in even more of a stock drop. By 2009, the cellphone market, a market that Sony used to have a fair share of became crowded by the likes of HTC, Samsung, and Apple creating handsets that were better than Sony’s offerings. By the end of 2012, Sony was a former shell of it’s past glory and wasn’ #1 in any industry that it had business whereas before it was #1 in many.
