At last. Sony has hit ctrl+alt+del. Its planned sale of its Vaio PC business is the first concrete sign in more than a decade that it is prepared to ditch the dross. More such reboots and it might recapture its long-lost dynamism. Failing that, not losing more money from terrible businesses would be a start.

The exact deal Sony agrees (it says is will inject 5 per cent of the capital itself) is irrelevant when so much money has been lost already. The significance is that doing any kind of deal shows that Kazuo Hirai, chief executive, has the will and the political wherewithal to change Sony’s culture. Sir Howard Stringer, his predecessor, did not and the group suffered. PCs for one should have been ditched long ago. Sony, whose global share has not climbed far above 2 per cent in 10 years, reports computers in the same unit as its fast-improving smartphones. It is unlikely to have turned a profit on the business in a long time. Even Lenovo, world number one in PCs, only squeezes out a 4 per cent operating margin.

Sony’s other big – and welcome – news, is that it will still own, but split out, its lossmaking TV business. There is a good case for it to ditch such a PC-like, commoditised, narrow-margin scale game. Still, hiving it into a separate company suggests that an eventual sale is possible and, at least, that Sony will view it on a standalone basis. Hopefully it will report it that way, too, because sorting Sony’s electronics gold from its dross has been near-impossible thus far. Bundling a lossmaker such as PCs in the same division as an apparent star such as Xperia smartphones epitomises Sony’s nasty habit of buoying dud units with profitable ones.