Sony has today announced redundancies across its Australian and New Zealand businesses, with an unconfirmed number of staff let go due to a massive international restructure.

The news follows a global announcement from Sony Corporation last month, in which the consumer electronics retailer confirmed that it would be undertaking a major rationalisation of its workforce, cutting 5,000 staff across its network of international subsidiaries, 1,500 of which would come from Sony’s head of operations in Japan. In the announcement, Sony said it hoped to reduce costs by 20 per cent with these staff cuts.

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In addition to the “headcount reduction” heralded by Sony Corporation, the global announcement detailed a restructure to the company’s portfolio of products, with an increased focus on mobile devices and high-end TVs and an exit from the PC category. Sony confirmed it would “cease planning, design and development of PC products” and that it would no longer manufacture or sell Vaio computers after the launch of its (northern hemisphere) spring 2014 line-up.

A month after these major announcements, the ramifications for the local market have become clearer, with Sony confirming that Australia and New Zealand would not be immune to the negative affects of the International restructure.

In a statement, Sony Australia today said:

In line with Sony Corporation’s 6 February 2014 earnings announcement outlining global headcount reduction, together with the decision to cease ranging Vaio products in the ANZ markets as of June 2014, Sony has implemented some organisational changes resulting in a number of redundancies across ANZ.

It is unclear how many staff will be affected by the cuts, whether they will come from the Vaio business alone or if other head office and administration roles will be hit by redundancies.

Today’s news follows a number of high-profile departures from the Sony Australia management team in 2013 — managing director Carl Rose resigned suddenly in June last year after 26 years with the company, followed one month later by the brand’s general manager of consumer marketing Nicholas Barendson, who moved to the company’s US subsidiary. 2013 also saw the departure of the company’s chief financial officer Nicholas Foster, and a high profile dispute with the Australian Taxation Office over a $53 million tax bill.

The redundancies are also not the first major round of job cuts to be undertaken by the company; in 2009, Sony Australia shed 32 staff due to “structural changes in the areas of AV/IT Sales, Marketing, Strategy & Brand Development, Customer Service & Operations and Commercial Management” according to then MD Carl Rose.

After his departure from Sony Australia, Rose spoke to Appliance Retailer about the difficulties facing the consumer electronics industry, saying the AV and IT categories were “fairly brutal”, that “you are not going to make the money” in laptops when compared to the tablet category, and that “flat panel TV was like a drug” that led to an “incredibly dangerous” focus on volume sales.

He also said Sony “had a lot of past glories and probably had their best decade a while ago”.

Sony Australia has been contacted for further comment.

UPDATE: While unable to provide details on numbers of staff affected or the broader impacts of the redundancies, a spokesperson for Sony has informed Appliance Retailer that today’s decision “impacts a number of employees across Sony’s sales, marketing and support functions”.