Sony Mobile has been having issues turning a profit for quite some time now. The company had to fire a lot of people last year as part of cutting costs and restructuring. The recent release of their new flagship, the Xperia Z4, definitely didn’t help any of that. For some reason, the company has decided to make this release a Japan exclusive without any proper marketing prior to it or anything like that. Reports are saying that the company will hold a global launch next month though, but we’ll see.
Anyhow, the company has released their FY14 financial results, which are basically Sony’s results for the year ending March 2015. The company has reported sales of $68.5 billion and operating income of $571 million, though keep in mind this is Sony in general we’re talking about here. Regarding the company’s mobile division, they shipped 39.1 million smartphones. Interesting enough, Sony doesn’t expect this year to be any better than last one, actually they expect a decline in mobile shipments. This Japan-based tech giant expects to ship 30 million units in the next 12 months (ending with March 2016), which is 23% less than they managed to ship this time around.
Sony has left the Chinese smartphone market last year and has also announced that it will put more focus on high-end smartphones as well as the U.S. market. More or less every Android manufacturer is trying to do the best they can in China and India, and it seems like Sony wants to stay away from the Chinese smartphone market. That’s somewhat understandable though, Sony was (and is) manufacturing low and mid-range devices, but the pricing of those devices apparently wasn’t able to compete with some of the China-based OEMs, not to mention that some other smartphone manufacturing giants are also fighting for market share in China.
It will be interesting to see what will Sony’s next step be, but either way we look at it, they’re going to need something truly great in order to turn things around. Sony is far from being just a smartphone OEM though, of course, they’re a huge corporation which is not only selling mobile devices, but also TVs, smartphone components, gaming consoles… and a lot more products. Sony will be fine, but their mobile division is kind of a mystery at this point.