Hot on the heels of Samsung which announced that they will be reducing the smartphone line-up come 2015, Sony also made the announcement that they will be doing the same. Unlike Samsung which is seeing reduced sales as a result of stiff competitions from both ends of the smartphone demographic, Sony is doing negatively on the balance sheet.
Sony seeks to reduce their smartphone line-up as they realize that losses are not ending. The plan here is to reduce marketing spend for more devices, same thing that Samsung is doing. But Sony in this case doesn’t care about reduced revenues, what’s important for them is that whatever sales they make, they go into profitability.
The last one year has been very bad for the Japanese company in the mobile and TV divisions. Video games and sensors have been the supporting businesses with Playstation and video streaming quite good business. Image sensors are also a big thing for them as they supply to many OEMs including Samsung.
The company comes from reducing sales forecast in the mobile division to 41 million units down from 50 million units and reported a $1.2 Billion net loss across the company. Sony this year released two flagships in the Xperia X line-up , the Xperia Z2 and Xperia Z3, both getting interesting reviews but the same didn’t translate to sales that would take them back to safety.
Now that Sony is not specifically aiming for market-share as Mobile Division Head states, we might see the company edge out of the top ten smartphone vendors quite easily with the slashes in line-up. Sony was already out of the top 5 spots which are currently firmly with Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, Lenovo and LG in that order with 23.8%, 12.0%, 5.3%, 5.2% and 5.1% share respectively going by IDC Q3 results.
