Sony To Bring Game Division Back To Profit

Sony Corp’s newly appointed corporate executive officer in charge of game and network businesses, Kazuo Hirai, said Thursday that one of the company’s ‘‘major missions’’ will be to bring its money-losing game division back into profit at an early timing through cost-cutting efforts and expansion of its network services. ‘‘We need to quickly bring our PlayStation business on a break-even level and later to profitability,’’ Hirai, also president of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc, said.

The 48-year-old Hirai is one of the four young executives appointed in April by Sony’s Welsh-born chief executive Howard Stringer in a radical management reshuffle carried out to speed up restructuring measures as the Japanese electronics giant sank deeply into the red. Sony’s game division logged an operating loss of about 58.5 billion yen in the 2008 business year ended in March, marking its third straight year of red ink. The company as a whole logged its biggest-ever group operating loss of nearly 230 billion yen.

But Hirai refused to comment on rumors that the company is planning to lower the price of its PlayStation 3 game console in autumn, only saying prices will be determined by ‘‘market developments.’’

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