If you’ve been interested in the mobile space for even just a little bit longer than Samsung’s rise to success, you’ll remember the name “Sony Ericsson”, which used to adorn classic cell phones that bought things like the Walkman to the cell phone, but Sony decided to buy out Ericsson from the joint venture a couple of years ago and has now brought their Xperia line of smartphones into the “One Sony” family. While this has arguably introduced us to some much better hardware since the first true Sony device, the Xperia Z, launched at the beginning of last year it’s clearly not doing wonders for the Japanese giant’s bank books.
Sony has once again readjusted their forecast for the financial year ending March 2015, and the outlook is even worse than it was before. The new adjustment sees Sony predicting an “impairment” (read:loss) of 180 Billion Yen, which is roughly $1.7 Billion, this is almost a quadrupling of the company’s previous prediction made back in July. The new report from Sony says that the mobile arm of the company was focused on “achieving significant sales growth” whereas now, the company is hoping the arm can achieve less volatile profits and bring stability to a business that is clearly pretty up and down. Specifically, the report from Sony states that the Xperia arm will be “concentrating on its premium lineup, and reducing the number of models in its mid-range lineup” in “certain geographical areas”.
As much as I personally like Sony phones – I recently just purchased an Xperia Z2 for personal use – this is hardly surprising. After all, releasing two flagships each and every year, just six months apart from each other sadly doesn’t give your customers much faith in your products. After all, why would the average consumer – which often purchases these devices on contract – sign on the dotted line in the Spring when they could wait for the Fall and sign away their life for something that’s newer, and perhaps quite a bit better. Still, reducing the number of products in their mid-range lineup could help a lot as well, what with Sony releasing a device seemingly every month nowadays. Maybe it’s just an idea Sony, but one flagship every 12 months is enough you know.