Despite major losses, SONY promises to maintain its smartphone business
It’s been quite a long time since SONY was considered a major player in the smartphone market. The company has been producing Android smartphones for years, but it never secured a position of dominance and has actually been bleeding cash for the past few years, losing nearly $1 billion in 2018 alone. Despite its current position, SONY CEO Kenichiro Yoshida announced today that the company’s smartphone business is instrumental to SONY’s overall success since the mobile devices are now being used as the main form of media consumption for younger generations.
Yoshida stated that “younger generations no longer watch TV,” and said, “we see smartphones as hardware for entertainment, and a component necessary to make our hardware brand sustainable.”
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Surprisingly, SONY is a key player in the smartphone segment, mainly due to the camera sensors it produces. Nearly all flagship smartphones on the market have used SONY camera sensors in the last 2-3 years. The company revealed earlier this year that internal conflicts had resulted in lack-lusted camera performance from recent SONY smartphones since the camera business was worried about the smartphone business cannibalizing its sales. With that issue resolved, we could finally see flagship SONY smartphones with cameras which can go head-to-head with its main competitors.
We’re always in favor of more competition within the Android ecosystem, but it’ll be interesting to see if SONY can actually change course a bit and deliver Android smartphones that consumers actually want to buy.
Source: Reuters