Across the globe, other high-tech chief executives say that they are finally gaining a proper sense of what opportunities lie ahead and what the machines of the future will do for us. Idei, meanwhile, relishes the idea that the future is more unclear than he can ever remember it.

“Nanotechnology, genetics, broadband communications, artificial intelligence — in the next ten years anything could happen,” he says in an exclusive interview with The Times.

It is that very uncertainty, he says from his modern, art-filled Tokyo headquarters, which allows Sony to get back to what it has always done best: dreaming up exciting new worlds, then building the gadgetry to make them a reality. As he looks out from his window over the neon-blazing city, he is clear that the fast-spending, experimental nature of Tokyo culture has been critical to Sony’s development: “Tokyo has created a society that is completely different from other regions of Asia,” he says.

Unfortunately, one element of Sony’s immediate future is abundantly clear. In four days’ time the giant corporation will be drawing a line under what has arguably been its toughest year since the Betamax debacle in the early 1980s. The company’s stock is almost exactly where it was last March, but it has both shed and regained 40 per cent of its value in the intervening 12 months. Idei has come under unprecedented fire for his handling of the so-called “Sony Shock ”, as investors endured a catastrophic plunge in profits and the maddening uncertainty of a big restructuring programme.

But Idei has emerged from all this with his confidence apparently unscathed. Nothing seems to dent his verbosely stated faith that Sony can deliver the sort of future-scapes that evidently play in his mind. “Of course in five years’ time your telephone will be your iPod. No doubt about it,” he says. “Mobile phones are already working as television sets.”

Idei is aware, however, of the many conflicts arising within his sprawling entertainment conglomerate. He merrily embraces the idea of machines converging into one handy unit, but his company has traditionally made its money from adding brand and technological expertise to a wide range of machines. He admits as much by playing down the importance of the current generation of mobile phones and particularly the dominance of Nokia. “I do not worry about handsets. We want to be independent and the phones you see now are nothing like what they will be eventually,” he says.

Through Sony Music and Sony Pictures, Idei also controls a content titan. This too presents him with the paradox of simultaneously churning out films and music — and the technology that can turn any teenager into a pirate.

But the Sony chairman prides himself on being the first to recognise that the game is finally up. “The music industry and the film industry have completely changed in the past five years,” he says. “In the past the music industry was just stubborn and said ‘no’ to person-to-person networks, ‘no’ to CD-Rom, ‘no’ to MP3. Now they all find out they were wrong.”

To prove how disruptive the past few years have been, Idei explains how amazed he was by the speed with which DVD sales shifted the very purpose of making films. Music, he claims, will undergo a similar transformation as revenue streams that seem trifling now — such as the fast-growing Japanese business of downloading pop songs as mobile phone ringtones — become principal sources of income.

Idei also attaches great importance to the appointments of Michael Lynton, who came via AOL and Pearson, and Andrew Lack, who came from NBC to, respectively, the top jobs at Sony Pictures and Sony Music. “Change hits the industry so we change executives,” he shrugs.

“We are the first company to introduce ‘normal’ management into the content industry. We can see this is only the beginning of the new era.”

For all his confidence, Idei is a man with obvious headaches, many of them generated by the roaring success of China. Japan’s rapidly growing neighbour represents, in a nutshell, all the issues Sony must face in the 21st century. Film, music and videogame piracy is rife, high-tech production costs are low.

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