14 DAY TRIAL // Sony has announced a significant restructuring of the leadership positions at its video games focused division, officially called Sony Computer Entertainment International, creating a new chairman role for Kaz Hirai and promoting Andrew House to the role of chief executive officer and president of the entire group.
The move will be made official on September 1, which means that Kaz Hirai will spend less than one year in his current role, after he was promoted in March.
Sony has stated that the reshuffling of positions at the top is not in any way linked to the problems that it has faced since the end of April, when the PlayStation Network has been brought down and a security breach that affected more than 70 million accounts began.
Andrew House has been working with Sony for more than 20 years and is at the moment the CEO of the European division of the company, working in his position since 2009.
The manager has overseen the launch of the original PlayStation, the long-running PlayStation 2 and the PlayStation Portable.
House stated, “It is both an honor and a privilege to be named as president and group CEO at SCEI. I believe there is huge potential for further growth of our business globally, and I’m looking forward to working with everyone in the SCE Group and with other groups in Sony to help achieve this potential by pursuing the creation of brand new user experiences.”
Kaz Hirai will continue to work with Andrew House in order to develop the PlayStation business.
He added, “In fiscal 2010, we achieved profitability for the first time in five years as a result of group-wide united efforts, including continuous cost reduction for PS3 in which I first took the initiative after assuming president of SCEI in December 2006.”
This year Sony is set to launch its new Vita handheld and will also aim to cut the sales lead of the Xbox 360 in North America.