Sony Corporation has a new Chief Executive Officer, with whom it will enter the new era on April 1, 2012. Starting next month, Kazuo Hirai will replace Sir Howard Stringer as Sony’s president and CEO. This change in management will be followed by a shift in the company’s strategy too, as Sony announced several drastic changes throughout its realm.

Hirai will take over from Howard Stringer, under whose rule Sony was literally unmanageable and in a bad shape. In fact, it’s not Stringer’s fault as he inherited quite a mess from Sony’s previous leader, Nobuyuki Idei. When Stringer took the charge, Sony was just a consumer electronic company and majorly involved in nearly every aspect of media creation and distribution.

So Hirai is here to tighten the reins. He will lead a new home entertainment division, which includes TVs, with a larger goal of replacing the consumer products and services group that he had previously led. This is a significant decision as Hirai has chosen to keep charge of the troubled television business, and hopes to revive it just like Sony did with its PlayStation game business.  That means a deep dive into software solutions around the device market, building a platform for continuous consumer interaction.

“The TV business is Sony’s main business and (its recovery) is an absolute condition that must be met for the firm to recover its performance,” said Keita Wakabayashi, an analyst at Mito Securities. “That’s why it will be placed directly under (Hirai’s) control, and means he has to take care of the most important issue. The market is big … but industrial electronics makers like Hitachi and Toshiba are already in this area so it’s not like Sony is advancing into a free territory. Compared to this, it’s much more important to improve the TV business.”

Sony is also appointing Kunimasas Suzuki, currently the Executive Deputy President of Consumer Products. & Services Group, in charge of unifying Sony products and creating a better user experience across the company’s entire product and network service line.

The post-PC era is one that’s taken its toll on a number of companies with a consumer-driven device market, from HP to Dell.  Many have made the switch to mobile, an area Sony’s taken initiative stretching its PlayStation gaming network to the Android platform for further distribution and even making devices of its own.  But as we’ve seen from the industry-wide transition, it will take more than this for Sony to survive in the long-run.