A lot of the news about the Sony Corporation over the last year has been, as its Welsh-born chairman, Howard Stringer, might say, rather dreary. Last summer, defective Sony laptop batteries proved liable to burst into flame, prompting an embarrassing recall.

The introduction last fall of the company’s PlayStation 3 game system was plagued by cost run-ups and delays. Last month, the Sony games god Ken Kutaragi retired. And the company continues to search for an answer to the iPod, in the portable media player business it once ruled.

Add to that the titanic struggle over Blu-Ray, the high-definition DVD format on which Sony has staked its strategic future. A stubborn rival format, backed by Toshiba and Microsoft, is not backing down.

Rising stock

Despite all this, Sony is, curiously, the land of the rising stock. If you look at the share performance of some of the biggest media companies over the last two years, roughly since Stringer was named as the first non-Japanese head of Sony, you might be surprised to see Sony among the leaders.

Sony shares are up more than 45 per cent over two years. It has performed far better than the Walt Disney Company and Time Warner during that time. In that crowd, it is topped only by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for appreciation in that period.

If you believe in this whole convergence thing, how Sony fares as a media company is as important as how it performs against rivals like Apple and Samsung. Apple has wildly outperformed Sony.

Sony stock has done better than Samsung in the last year or two, but over the last five years, Samsung has been a far better investment, as have any of the media giants mentioned above.

There is evidence to suggest that the new course the company has pursued, not to mention luck and timing — has yielded promising results.

There are three main reasons. One is that Sony has gone a long way toward mending its electronics business, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of an expected $70 billion in sales in the year ended in March 2007.

The second is that the company’s sprawling east-west software-hardware agglomeration may at last be starting to make sense. And, finally, there is Sony’s simple recognition of how deep a hole it got itself into — and how far it still needs to climb back.

The standout in electronics is the revitalization of Sony’s TV business, after earlier bungles,  something that was mainly in the works before Stringer stepped up to the chairmanship. Sony has  managed to maintain both premium pricing and lead the market in sales for its Bravia LCD sets for two Christmases in a row.

Similarly, Sony’s camera business has improved since it acquired the assets of Konica Minolta last year. And a wildly successful new product for the company globally has been a line of mobile phone or Walkman players that it is producing in a joint venture with Ericsson. When it comes to examining Sony’s health, the PlayStation, its biggest profit driver.

The PlayStation 2 remains the biggest seller among all gaming systems. And Sony took a big gamble by building new Blu-Ray players into the PS3, which contributed to delays and higher prices.

At the very least, the “Sony United” strategy of Stringer has proved that some of the engineers, marketers and Hollywood types can actually talk to one another.

The company has made clear that if the market continues to assign no value to the $7-billion-a-year entertainment businesses it will look at doing an initial public offering.

And it has said that it intends at some point to sell part of its financial services business, which has little profile outside Japan but has helped the company through some lean years.

In the last two years, Sony has cut jobs and costs and exited businesses to increase profit margins to a modest 5 per cent by this time next year.