Sony: smartphones are essential for us

Sony’s president and CEO, Kenichiro Yoshida, said during a presentation that the smartphone branch is essential to the brand’s portfolio. He thus repeats Sony’s position to stick to the loss-making part.

“We see smartphones as hardware for entertainment and as a necessary component to make our hardware brand sustainable. Younger generations are no longer watching TV. Their first point of contact is the smartphone,” said Yoshida. According to Reuters, the CEO also said that Sony’s consumer electronics business has focused on entertainment from the start and “not on everyday necessities like refrigerators and washing machines.”

During the most recent quarterly figures, the division responsible for the Xperia smartphones again performed quite poorly. It is the only division to lose. Deliveries of Sony’s smartphones halved in 2018 and this division recorded an operating loss of approximately 788 million euros. This depressed the results of the entire company, although the annual turnover still amounted to 70 billion euros and the operating profit at 7.2 billion euros.

Sony wants to reverse the negative trend in the smartphone branch by cutting costs. For example, the company has stopped production at a factory in Beijing and is focusing more on the integration of gaming. Bloomberg previously wrote that Sony wants to withdraw from the Middle East and South America in the smartphone market. The company is also rumored to halve the workforce of its smartphone division for March 2020, from 4,000 to 2,000. A similar major reorganization already took place in 2015 in the smartphone division.

Sony Xperia 1