Sony had a successful year in 2002 and are now discussing ambitious plans for the future:

SONY seems to have learnt one basic lesson of corporate public relations: messages are better received when you are making money. Little more than a year ago, when the company reported losses of ¥43.3 billion ($354m) in one six-month period, its chief executive, Nobuyuki Idei, was unusually reserved. Grand talk of long-term plans for the future, he said, could wait until the electronics and media giant showed a better command of the present. Now Mr Idei is basking in record sales and handsome profits - in the most recent quarter, net profits nearly doubled, to ¥125.4 billion ($1.02 billion) - and he has seized the opportunity to crank up the volume and talk about Sony's big plans for your living room.

Compared with other large media companies, the Japanese giant has earned some right to brag. Over the past few years, Sony has studiously kept its head down, while the likes of AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal and Bertelsmann sought to build ever-bigger conglomerates through mergers and acquisitions. Although the details varied, the idea behind all those deals was to buy new outlets through which the behemoths could push their music, films, news and other media content. The outlets ranged from cable and satellite broadcasters to internet portals, and the excursion has ended in much heartache.

....Sony has gone about things differently. But its ambitions are in many ways even bolder than those of the other media giants. Like them, it believes that the spread of broadband and the shift from analogue to digital require media firms to find new ways to sell their content to consumers - in Sony's case, mostly music, films and video games. It also believes that in the battle to do this, as the slogan for its 1998 film "Godzilla" put it, size matters.

More importantly, however, Sony is pursuing the other big idea in the media giants' growth strategy: vertical integration. But once again, it is doing it in its own way. The difference is that Sony is reaching much further down the chain, to what Mr Idei believes really matters: the televisions, personal computers, game consoles and hand-held devices through which all of that wonderful content will one day be streaming.

Whatever happens to its media businesses, Sony's first love is still consumer electronics. From video recorders to compact discs, from Walkmans to PlayStations, it has consistently helped to change the way in which people acquire and use media content. The difference now is that Sony does not expect its next breakthrough to come from a single new electronic device. Instead, as Mr Idei and Sony's president, Kunitake Ando, are telling anybody who will listen, the idea is to make a whole range of devices more useful by linking them in a networked home-entertainment system.

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