Oxford man who fought in Vietnam is not bound by restrictive cultural ties, writes Toby Shapshak

'The bloody world fell apart," said Sir Howard Stringer, before bursting out laughing on being asked how his turnaround strategy for Sony was going.

"I had a bit of a setback. It's called the worldwide recession. I went from record profits to record losses in one year. (That's) what really happened," he chuckled.

Stringer, knighted in 1999, is not your average global CEO, especially not in the staid, conventional Japanese business culture. Nor, as his comments show, is he a shrinking violet. But the plain-spoken, charismatic Welshman, who was promoted from head of Sony's US operations to lead the consumer electronics giant, is the man Sony is looking to to save it.

In the face of unprecedented competition from the likes of Apple in the US and other Asian conglomerates, notably Samsung, Sony's crown as the arbitrator of tech coolness has slipped.

"We invented backlit LED (televisions) and Samsung got there faster because they were more disciplined. That was our innovation," he said.

"We watched ourselves lose market share. As long as we have innovation I don't mind if others copy us - as long as we get to market faster."

Indeed, Sony is still basking in its recent format-war victory: its Blu-ray technology trounced the competitor HD-DVD, designed by Toshiba, for the replacement to DVD.

Blu-ray has enabled the rapid implementation and uptake of another new technology making headlines this year: 3D.

"Blu-ray's victory made 3D possible faster. We should be proud of that," said Stringer.

Sony is unlike other technology companies in that it not only owns the devices (from TVs and media players to laptops and cellphones) but also the content suppliers (movie studios).

It also makes 3D cameras (used to shoot the movie Avatar) and projectors used in half of America's 3D cinemas.

A new service called Qriosity aims to tie these all together and more effectively deliver content to living rooms and portable devices, including the online services associated with the PlayStation 3 games console.

Stringer, 68, graduated from Oxford, where he was a rugby blue, and emigrated to the US in 1965. He joined the US Army and served in the Vietnam war, then worked as a journalist and producer at broadcaster CBS for 30 years.

He joined Sony Corporation of America in 1997 and in June 2005 became the first non-Japanese to be named CEO of Sony Corporation itself.

Yuuki Sakurai, the president of Fukoku Capital Management, part of Japan's ninth-largest life insurer Fukoku Mutual Life, told Bloomberg last year that "as a non-Japanese ... Stringer is better positioned to conduct the large-scale restructuring that Sony has to do."

Uninhibited by cultural ties, Stringer has broken down the silos between businesses, which "worked really well when the competition was disorganised, but not when you're in the digital world", he said.

"The digital world is simply horizontal, and you have to get people to work across product lines, across country lines, in order to bring out the best of Sony. The worst of Sony is we have too many products; the best of Sony is we have too many products.

"If you can integrate them and relate them - and that's why 3D and South Africa (the World Cup sponsorship) has turned out as a good opportunity. Because, for us, 3D connects all the Sony products to each other, as does Google TV, as do online services that we're creating to distribute content over horizontal platforms, touching all the products. For me, this is the road back."

The recession has allowed Sony to reorganise itself and its strategic plans.

"I've reorganised management, probably in its totality. We've probably done more in the last year than we've done in the last four. The missing element was the cellphone business (Sony Ericsson, a joint venture with Sweden's Ericsson). That's coming back and is profitable."

Stringer said Sony might revisit its strongest brand - PlayStation - being handled by a third party in South Africa. PlayStation has been managed by Primedia's Ster-Kinekor from the days before Sony set up its local operation.

Other product highlights include the new range of Android-power Xperia smartphones (especially the X10 Mini Pro, which has a slide-out Qwerty keyboard under its touchscreen), Sony's Google TV deal to get Internet content onto its Bravia TV, and Dash, a web device that is "a 21st-century alarm clock; it's kind of fun".

Sony is in good hands, however un-Japanese they are.

• Shapshak is the editor of Stuff magazine