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Sony's Mobile Business Is Shrinking Out of Existence (theverge.com)
The latest earnings report from Sony indicates the company's already tiny smartphone business has shrunk by almost half. "In the quarter ending in July 2018, Sony managed to sell only 2 million mobile devices, down 1.4 million from the same period in the proceeding year," reports The Verge. From the report: In its 2017 accounting year, Sony sold 13.5 million phones, and back in April its modest estimate for 2018 was 10 million, but now that's been revised down to 9 million. Anticipating it will make only $5.49 billion of mobile sales for the entire fiscal 2018, Sony is now in a close contest with HTC for the title of being the least relevant global Android device vendor. At least BlackBerry has its promise of uniquely secure phones and keyboards with actual, physical buttons on them. Sony's signature mobile feature in recent times has been an insistence on shipping massive bezels for way too long. It's important to note that while Sony's mobile business is hurting, Sony as a whole is in good financial health.
The Xperia Compact phones are the only decent size phones with decent specs. Larger phones are a colossal pain since dealing with the extra weight and size is not worth it when I don't use the phone to consume media, browse the web much (maybe when I am not right near a computer, but that is it), or spend the day on social media apps. In decreasing order of importance, I need a phone that: makes phone calls, lets me text, acts as a hotspot, has GPS/maps for navigation, and a browser for the occasional quick search on the go. I don't need a Galaxy whatever or a phone with a ~6.5 inch display for that.
The Xperia Compact phones are a bit overpriced for what you get, but they are otherwise very high quality and nice to use. Every other phone I have seen with a ~4.5 inch display is rubbish (assuming you can even find a current year model, as that is getting to be more difficult), and every other decent phone nowadays is ~5.5 or larger.
I really hope they manage to stick around since they are servicing a part of the market nobody else seems to be interested in servicing.
Sony has never been good at playing to their strengths, despite having numerous strengths. I don't expect this to suddenly change.
It's sad that $5.49bil in sales is considered "small." In any other consumer electronics business, that's HUGE.
Bribes from Apple explain a lot.
As a member of a former Sony buying family, I can say with confidence - the problem is lack of bug fixes to the software. Massive show-stopping feature omissions which are never fixed is what drove us away.
We do not care about bezels, notches, thinness etc. But we wont buy phones without:
OK, so its probably ten years since anyone in the family bought a Sony - we consumers remember being shafted for a long time
If Sony (or anyone else) want to buy us back, then support for 3rd party OSes is the best bet, not because many will install one, but because it publically demonstrates abandoning the "we enjoy shafting our users" mentality.
It may have escaped your attention, but very few phone users are suckers these days, because they have all had several phones before. (Apple users don't count - they have always had the same phone each time).
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