Cellphone seen as Sony profit driver
TOKYO: Sony Corp, whose Xperia smartphones are outsold more than 6-1 by Samsung Electronics Co models, can turn its handset business into a profit driver by focusing more on high-end devices, chief executive officer Kazuo Hirai said.
“That’s why we are in this business, and that’s why we invested heavily in the business,” Hirai told reporters in Tokyo yesterday. “I believe we still have a lot of room to grow.”
Sony, struggling to end a streak of four straight full-year losses, plans to make its mobile-phone business profitable in the year beginning April 1, it said in August. Waterresistant phones were among the new products released at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this month as Sony tries to woo customers from Samsung, the world’s largest mobile-phone maker, and Apple Inc, the maker of the iPhone.
“It’s going to be hard for Sony to catch up,” said Hideki Yasuda, an analyst at Ace Securities Co in Tokyo. “Still, the market is expected to continue growing, and that will probably enable Sony to boost sales.”
The Tokyo-based Walkman inventor, which is targeting a 20-billion-yen (US$226mil) profit this fiscal year, lost 31% of its market value in 2012 amid continued losses at its TV-making unit, a strong yen and a slow global economy.
Sony is cutting 10,000 jobs and trying to turn around its unprofitable TV-making business after posting a record 457-billion-yen net loss in the year ended March 31. The company bought out its mobile-phone venture with Sweden’s Ericsson AB for 1.05 billion euros (US$1.4bil) in February and is eliminating about 15% of the unit’s workforce and moving its headquarters to Tokyo from Sweden.
“We basically are out of the feature-phone business and in the Android-based smartphone business,” Hirai said, referring to the Google Inc operating system. “We are more in toward the high end of the market as opposed to trying to get into the commoditised portion.”
Sony plans to boost smartphone sales by 51% to 34 million units in the year ending March 31. The company sold 8.8 million in the quarter ended Sept 30. In comparison, Suwon, South Korea-based Samsung sold 56.9 million and Apple 26.9 million, Boston-based Strategy Analytics said in October. — Bloomberg