Rating: Is it preparing a W7 Mango phone as well?
Things ain’t looking to good for Sony Ericsson which shipped a mere nine million handsets during Q4 2011. Shipments were down by 20 per cent year-to-year but worst still 5 per cent lower than Q3 [2011]. That’s bad because Q4 is normally good thanks to Xmas present sales. Most observers point out, however, that Sony Ericsson is the first in its league to report sales and both HTC’s and Motorola’s figures shouldn’t be much better. Q4 2011 was the last time this business will report as Sony Ericsson. Sony bought out its partner of 11 years in October 2011. GoMo News believes that the new name will be Sony Mobile Communications and if the US press is to be believed, the company will focus much more intently on the North American market than it has in the past. However, Sony obviously want to have a five-screen offering in the consumer electronics market and having the Sony brand on a smartphone should help this strategy.
The five elements of Sony’s strategy are: – games stations, computers, tablets, televisions and phones. The phones bit existed before but never quite made it.
For example, Sony Ericsson never quite managed to take advantage of the PlayStation image with the Xperia Play models.
Just like it didn’t manage to capitalise on its Cyber-shot brand for cameraphones. The Walkman brand didn’t help either.
US source are quoting Sony Mobile’s Bert Nordberg as saying that his division is focusing its efforts on the United States. “In other words, it has instituted a ‘US-first’ strategy,” Nordberg said.
Whether this will be a good or bad thing remains to be seen. According to IDC, for example, the focus on Android refreshed the company’s portfolio, but didn’t bring profits.
“The company was never able to differentiate with a strong set of devices at competitive price points and was always seen as a Tier Two supplier to most operators,” IDC observed.
The company added, “Only Apple and Samsung are out-performing the market, which shows that despite the tough conditions, the right products at the right prices continue to boost consumer confidence and consumers’ willingness to spend their cash on the latest handsets — but only when they over-exceed their expectations.”
Of course, Sony could decide to do a Nokia and throw in its hand big time with Microsoft (always a popular move with the US Press).
Which is why there are reports that pictures of a Windows W7 Mango based handset have escaped into the wild on the internet as reported by IT Pro Portal here.
Personally, GoMo News has always felt that the Sony Ericsson brand name was clumsy. We advocated the company should have quietly dropped the Ericsson bit right from the beginning.
