TOKYO — Sony is focusing its TV business strategy on liquid-crystal displays and rear-projection television sets but will continue to assemble and sell plasma display sets for now, the company said Monday.
Shigenori Yoshida, a spokesman for the Japanese electronics and entertainment giant, said Sony Corp.'s strategy is to focus on LCD and rear-projection sets but denied that Sony had any plans to pull out of making plasma display sets.
Sony has been beefing up its LCD TV operations with a tie-up with Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea.
Sony is expecting to sell 11.4 million TVs during this fiscal year through March 2005, and the portion taken up by plasma display sets is relatively small.
It sold 9.4 million cathode ray tube sets, 1 million rear-projection TVs, 700,000 LCD sets and just 300,000 plasma display sets. Sony does not make its own plasma displays but assembles TVs that use such displays.
Demand for thinner TVs is growing around the world.