- Wednesday, 25 November 2009
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He is drinking from the INQwell when he should be drinking beer - Anonymiser
Sony blames handsets for sales downturn
NO WONDER handset maker, Sony Ericsson, announced its intention to cut some 2,000 jobs (estimated to be circa 17 per cent of the workforce) last week.
One JV parent, Sony, has just admitted that its income from handset sales fell from around $160 million last year to about $5 million this year.
At the time of announcing its handset sales, Sony Ericsson had blamed an unfavourable product mix – particularly in Europe – for the poor results.
Still it managed to sell some 24.4 million handset in the last quarter and continues to believe that the total number of handsets shipped (by everyone) globally in 2008 will be about 1.2 billion.
Of course, average selling prices for handsets are dropping. Just look at the Iphone.
Interestingly, the news service, Bloomsburg, decided to hold a straw poll of analysts to predict how many handsets they thought Motorola had sold in the last quarter.
The figure they came up with was 26.1 million which is less than the 27.7 million which LG has just announced it has shipped. That would put LG into a global third place with something like a nine per cent share and Motorola in fourth with an 8.5 per cent share.
Samsung is in second place and Nokia is naturally still the market leader by a long chalk. But the interesting point is that – despite its woes – Sony Ericsson still managed to sell some 24.4 million handsets.
Yet nobody is saying that Sony Ericsson might outsell Motorola in the next quarter so the INQ will. The attraction of Sony Ericsson's Walkman phones seems to have been seriously underestimated. µ
L'Inq
Bloomberg
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I don't understand their strategy w.r.t. NA. Very few models of Sony Ericsson are available in USA. I love walkman series phones. And all I can buy are a 1 walkman model from AT&T or 3 walkman models from sonystyle.com: that too, low end pieces. For other series also, few models are available. When are they going to introduce new high-end models in USA, one of the biggest market?
I don't what is happening with SE. Since a couple of year already it seems they have lost their touch. They used to bring the most advanced handsets to the market (e.g. T68i) but now they are lagging so much behind the other manufacturers. Also the design of their handsets is quite bad. With very few exceptions the handsets look really ugly... I personally stopped waiting for something really good to be announced by SE. Unfortunately...
Sony Ericcson I've had 2 mobiles from them a V630i and currently a K770i and within 8 months of use both have had the same problems and had to be sent in for repair.

It's either phone crases during a call, battery dosn't last long roughly 2 days I hardly use it to talk or text. Headphone/charger jack is the worst always comes loose and connections don't work properly.

I'm with Vodafone and my k770i is in for a 2nd time as the 1st they didn't fix any of the above it's always a software corruption. How the hell does (supposedly) updating the software fix a battery and dodgy jack socket. They don't upgrade the software they factory re-set it if they did I wouldn't be able to download from Sony Ericcson's website the new software and they update every 4 months.