Forty of Sony’s top executives, including Kazuo Hirai, chief executive, are to give up bonuses worth 30-50 per cent of their pay after they failed to keep a promise to return the Japanese group’s consumer electronics division to profit.
The bonuses, estimated at Y1bn ($10m) in total, were to have been paid for work done in the fiscal year ended in March. Executives at the company, which has reported losses for the past four years, have given up pay and bonuses before, but the scale of their latest act of atonement is the largest so far.
Sony said that Mr Hirai had submitted a proposal to the company’s remuneration committee to eliminate the bonuses “in recognition that there is still progress to be made” in turning round the electronics division, which is centred on a fading television manufacturing business.