“Sony Corp sees the smartphone business as indispensable to its brand portfolio, its CEO said, bucking calls from some investors that the Japanese electronics firm should scrap the money-losing business,” Makiko Yamazaki reports for Reuters.
“The smartphone business reported an operating loss of 97.1 billion yen ($879.45 million) in the year ended March, lagging rivals such as Apple and Samsung Electronics and weighing on the group’s record-breaking profit,” Yamazaki reports. “[CEO] Kenichiro Yoshida told a group of journalists on Wednesday, ‘We see smartphones as hardware for entertainment and a component necessary to make our hardware brand sustainable. And younger generations no longer watch TV. Their first touch point is smartphone.'”
“The business, originally a joint venture with Sweden’s Ericsson that Sony took full control of in 2012, has a global market share of less than 1%, shipping just 6.5 million handsets annually, mainly to Japan and Europe, according to Sony’s financial statement,” Yamazaki reports. “As Sony aims to make the business profitable next financial year, it ceased production at its Beijing plant and streamlined some sales operations globally.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Confused thinking.
Sony is effectively selling zero smartphones. Apple alone sells more iPhones every eleven days than Sony sells all year.
We don’t know if Yoshida is confused because he sees them in Sony execs hands all day, but something’s causing his profound disconnect with reality on the smartphone front.
It’s odd, Sony has all of the components required to make a great smartphone, great cameras (Apple uses their sensors), great displays and brand recognition but they produce dull, rectangular bricks. Their famed industrial design that Steve so admired seems to have deserted them in this area.
I think MDN missed his point, for Sony it’s not about the numbers, it’s about providing a complete portfolio of products to their customers, something Apple could learn from these days (AirPort, Mac Pro, Displays…).
But Sony has always been awful at software. Great hardware with a 1979 user interface.
Actually forgot about that aspect which is rather important. They would probably do a lot better if they just shipped the stock version of Android.
MDN forgets that Apple relies heavily on Sony for its cameras and photo software. So if Sony (and all the other Asian suppliers Apple has wed itself to) is so terrible, why does Apple consider them good enough?
I would be willing to bet that almost all current iPhone devotees have never actually given a Sony mobile phone a trial run. Certainly not a long term honest evaluation.
It is the nature of the beast, after all. Once locked into a platform, the fanboy will put on blinders to all the innovations that occur outside his gilded cage.