BANGKOK -- Sony's chief executive Kazuo Hirai can sum up the company's mission in just one word: "Wow!"

It may sound like a joke, but Hirai is serious about wowing customers with products and services that are first and foremost fun. And no wonder: It is perhaps the only way to set a common goal for a company whose businesses range from semiconductors and imaging sensors, to gaming systems and movies.

Sony has valued fun from the start. Co-founder Masaru Ibuka even wrote it into the company's charter in 1946, describing the nascent business as an "ideal factory where free and fun spirits bring out the best of serious technologists' talents."

The result has been a long history of products and services with a high enjoyment factor: radios, TVs, CDs and CD players, video players, games, music, movies and more.

In addition to its successes, Sony also chalked up a number of commercial flops with such eccentric products as scented cassette tapes and a TV that could display mirror-reversed images.

Fully tapping into this whimsical, fun-focused tradition could be the key to unlocking Sony's next big breakthroughs, this time in the realm of robotics and artificial intelligence.

A tough 10 years

For people working in Sony's electronics divisions, "fun" has been the last thing on their minds over the past decade. They were frequently under pressure to cut costs, and the possibility of businesses being terminated was never far off. The company has withdrawn from liquid-crystal display manufacturing, ended production of its Vaio personal computers, and pulled out of the lower-end TV and mobile phone markets. This July, the company decided to sell its battery unit.

Sony has slashed its production facilities for hardware, excluding semiconductors and video game equipment, by as much as 80% in 10 years, from 1 trillion yen in book value in spring 2006 to just 200 billion yen in spring 2016. Electronic hardware, including final products and semiconductors and other components, accounted for just 55% of total revenue excluding financial services in the year through March this year, compared to 68% 10 years before.

As a result of these restructuring efforts, Sony's remaining businesses are almost all strong ones.

As more and more portable devices come equipped with cameras, Sony's complementary metal-oxide semiconductor image sensors have secured a dominant market position.

The company's audio equipment unit, meanwhile, is producing one hit product after another, including glass speakers and high-resolution headphones. Hideki Wakabayashi, a veteran independent analyst of the electronics sector based in Tokyo, thinks the potential applications for Sony's audio technology could go beyond just sound equipment. "The midterm profit target for the audio business should be much more ambitious than for TVs," he said.

And the upcoming release of a head-mounted display unit for the PlayStation 4 is aimed at turning the video game system into one of the world's most ubiquitous virtual reality platforms.

Andrew House, head of Sony's game business, has talked about plans for developing nongaming VR applications for the system that could change the way people experience movies or live concerts.

On the content side, the rapid expansion of subscription-based online streaming services is fueling new revenue growth from recorded music, movies, TV shows and other licensed entertainment. These new-generation services include Spotify of Sweden and Pandora of the U.S. for music, and Netflix of the U.S. for video.

Goldman Sachs analyst Masaru Sugiyama believes this trend will see content businesses become "one of the main growth drivers for Sony" starting this year. He projects operating profit will top 580 billion yen in the year ending March 2018, surpassing the company's stated target of 500 billion yen.

Serious fun

This upswing in earnings momentum forms the backdrop to Sony's decision to revive robotics and AI technology as its new primary business domain.

But the field is already crowded with powerful players, including Apple, Alphabet (the parent of Google), Facebook and Amazon.com. They boast massive cash reserves and are ready to offer generous salaries to secure the best engineers and scientists. Sony's first challenge will be to compete with these giants for global talent.

Hiroaki Kitano, the newly appointed corporate executive overseeing Sony's robotics and AI initiative, recently told the Nikkei Asian Review that he views Amazon's Echo, a voice-controlled, AI-enabled speaker phone, as a benchmark. Typically, Echo sits in a room and waits for a user to ask it a question, request weather information or even place an Amazon order.

Echo has been available to the U.S. public for more than a year, collecting huge amounts of usage data every day. More and more third-party developers, including online services like Spotify, are connecting their services to Echo and making them voice-controllable. The longer it takes for Sony to develop its own robots and AI services, the wider the experience gap with Amazon will become. Apple and Google are also reinforcing their voice-controlled AI assistant services.

Sony has developed a prototype of Xperia Agent, an AI-powered speaker phone. Apart from the fact that Agent moves its "face" to follow a user's face, its basic functionality seems similar to that of Echo and Apple's Siri.

This raises a question: Should Sony continue developing the Xperia Agent in its current direction and compete directly against established players? Or should the company try to follow a different path?

Whichever path it takes, Sony's robots and AI services will need to boast unique, breakthrough features that set them apart from rivals' offerings. And for that, the company will have to once again activate the fun-seeking switches in its corporate DNA.

Ken Koyanagi is Nikkei Asian Review editor-at-large.Nikkei staff writer Rei Nakafuji contributed to this article.