Kaz Hirai No Longer President Of Sony Consumer Products Division

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Things are being shaken up at Sony in the aftermath of the PlayStation Network outage from April. The popular Kaz Hirai, who had been serving as President and CEO of Sony as a whole will leave his role for a new one at Sony Computer Entertainment. But, industry watchers say that Hirai isn’t being punished for the PSN outage.

Before April, Hirai had been just Group CEO and President at Sony Computer Entertainment. Just weeks before the PSN outage, Hirai was promoted to Deputy President of all of Sony, as well as President of the Consumer Products division – in addition to staying in the top role at SCEI. The move was seen as a vote of confidence in Hirai, and the common school of thought amongst Sony watchers was that the 50-year-old Kaz Hirai was being groomed to replace Welsh-born Sir Howard Stringer as the next Chairman/CEO/President of the entire Sony empire.

Now, after the PlayStation Network outage, which was right in Hiari’s wheelhouse as it directly affected his division, is being shuffled around. He’ll step down from his role as President of the Consumer Products division, but he will become Chairman of the Sony Computer Entertainment Division. So, he won’t oversee all of Sony’s consumer products (TVs, Camcorders, etc.), but, he’ll have a greater role in the video game division.

Although it may look like Sony is trying to shunt Kaz Hirai into the video game business and keeping him away from Sony proper, financial analysts still say that Hirai is well liked by the Sony board of directors and say that he’s still the #2 man to replace Sir Howard when he retires.

Replacing Kaz as President of the Consumer Products division is Andrew House. House was previously the head of Sony Computer Entertainment’s European division.

I think it just shows how big of a role the PlayStation is in Sony, considering that all these up and coming executives are coming from the company’s gaming division.

I know Kaz Hirai has many fans in the gaming community who like his soft-spoken approach. Have no worries, he’s still expected to become the Chairman of the entire Sony Corporation after Stringer leaves.