The top brass of Sony Corp. have told shareholders that the electronics giant was firmly on the path to recovery and set a goal of selling 100 million PlayStation 3 machines.

"We will continuously execute structural reform to improve earnings and to fully carry out growth strategies," chairman Howard Stringer and president Ryoji Chubachi said in a joint statement.

His effort was rewarded with better-than-expected earnings for the full year to March although the botton line remains weighed down by painful restructuring costs.

"The management has been thinking how we can revitalize the company," Stringer and Chubachi said Thursday.

"In the year to March 2006, we were able to make steady progress at the appropriate speed toward our goals. We will continue this effort ... by proactively monitoring our progress," they said.

Over the next several years, the company hopes to sell as many as 100 million PlayStation 3 (PS3) game consoles, which will hit the market in November, said Sony Computer Entertainment president and chief executive Ken Kutaragi.

The PlayStation 3 is one of Sony's core products and its success is considered vital to the group's revival.

Sony has long dominated the home video-game market and in November the group said its shipments of the PlayStation 2 console had topped 100 million since March 2000, including 22.2 million in Asia alone.

The PlayStation 3 will be equipped with a "Cell" processor, jointly developed with IBM and Toshiba, which is about 35 times faster than the existing PlayStation 2 consoles.

Sony is using its next generation Blu-ray Disc technology - which is expected to have a greater storage capacity than rival format HD DVD - in the PlayStation 3 with the aim of making it a home entertainment centre.

Sony, which was born in the ashes of World War II and changed the way the world listened to music with its Walkman, has been criticized for failing to keep up with the times as Apple rode the more recent portable music boom with its iPod.

"I tell everybody, don't call anything an iPod killer because (Apple chief executive) Steve Jobs is always thinking," Stringer told Britain's Financial Times in an interview published Thursday.

He called his effort a "ground-up revolution" by changing the way things work.

"We still have a few silos that need probing but most of the walls have come down," he said of resistance to his drive.

He mentioned that future goals include expanding Sony's presence in fast-growing economies such as Brazil, China, India and Russia.

Source: Physorg