Chief Executive Howard Stringer will announce the move at a news conference on Thursday. The maker of Bravia LCD TVs, Cyber-shot digital cameras and PlayStation game consoles will also cut its earnings outlook, the Nikkei said, without citing sources.

Officials at Sony were not immediately available for comment.

Sony outlined plans last month to curb investment, close five to six plants and cut a total of 16,000 regular and contract jobs globally to save $1.1 billion a year in costs, as the global recession hurts demand for its products and a firm yen eats into profits made overseas.

Sony plans to eliminate about 3 percent of its domestic full-time staff, or more than 2,000 workers, mainly through to natural attrition, by the end of the financial year ending in March 2010, the Nikkei said.

But talk of cutting jobs in Japan has met internal company resistance, the Financial Times reported this week.

The company, which generates about two-thirds of its revenue outside Japan, is likely to suffer an annual operating loss of about 100 billion yen ($1.1 billion) in the year ending March 31, a person with knowledge of the matter told Reuters earlier this month.

Analysts on average see an operating loss of 8.9 billion yen, according to a poll of 18 brokerages by Reuters Estimates.

Sony is looking at integrating TV assembly and production into one of the factories and use the other for distribution and other purposes, the Nikkei said.

Both of the company's TV plants in Japan are located in Aichi, central Japan.

It would be the company's first restructuring of its domestic manufacturing base since 2006 when it closed down a portable music player plant, the paper added.

The Nikkei also said Sony plans to slash executive and managerial-level bonuses to cut costs.

(Reporting by Ted Kerr and Sachi Izumi, editing by Edwina Gibbs)