Sony CEO: Strong Holiday Outlook Will Spur Turnaround

"We saw a very positive sales increase for televisions, computers and PS3 in particular. I don't think there were any negatives, but we need a little more time to find out how big it was," Stringer told a group of reporters on Thursday, according to Reuters.

Stringer also cautioned that it was too soon to tell whether the early numbers would signal a longer-term economic improvement into 2010, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Sony doesn't have the mighty market share in many consumer electronics categories that it once owned, but the Tokyo-based company said it has a new business plan to achieve a 5 percent operating margin and a return on equity of 10 percent by the end of 2013. One way the company plans to achieve those goals is by entering the rechargeable battery market, Stringer said.

"Don't forget we started lithium-ion batteries at Sony. ... If you produce the right battery, they will come," Stringer said, according to Reuters.

In particular, Sony plans to look at lithium-ion batteries for electric cars, which Stringer expects to become a much bigger market. "It's worth putting our best engineers at it ... It's worth a shot, I think," Stringer told Reuters.

Stringer's outlook for the holiday shopping season was more positive than the November numbers posted by several retailers that missed monthly estimates, according to Reuters.

Analysts had expected a 2.5 percent rise in November sales, according to Thomson Reuters data, but that expectation has been lowered to 2.1 percent following some retailers' reports that they experienced lower-than-expected sales. However, those results did not include some top IT and CE retailers such as Best Buy and Amazon.com, which don't report monthly numbers.