Printing-ink veterans don't take cyberspace journalists too seriously - Roy Greenslade, Guardian Online
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Sony Ericsson reveals a 47 per cent drop in profits
PHONE MAKER Sony Ericsson has published another set of dismal financial results for the first quarter of 2011, showing a 47 per cent drop in profits from the same period in 2010.
Sony Ericsson has had a lacklustre year when it comes to handsets with only the Xperia Play garnering any attention, and that has been reflected in its first quarter financial results. Aside from the staggering 47 per cent drop in profits to just €11 million, unit sales were down by over 22 per cent to 8.1 million units.
The fact that Sony Ericsson made a profit is being put down to its adoption of Google's Android operating system. Bert Nordberg, president and CEO of Sony Ericsson repeated a similar statement to the one he made three months ago, saying, "Sony Ericsson's profitability continues as we accelerate our shift towards an Android-based smartphone portfolio, with smartphones comprising over 60 per cent of our total sales during the quarter."
Sony Ericsson is banking on its Xperia Play to do well, but it said that there was some disruption in its supply chain due to last month's earthquake in Japan. However the only ray of light for Sony Ericsson was the increased number of smartphones it sold, which resulted in a five per cent rise in average selling price to €141.
Although Sony Ericsson attributed its financial results to the adoption of the Android operating system, it clearly needs to do a lot more to remain relevant in the smartphone market. It is being hammered by other Android loving mobile firms such as Samsung, LG, HTC and the low-cost Chinese outfits ZTE and Huawei, all of which provide a wide range of designs at different price points.
Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play should help the company post slightly better second quarter sales figures, and Nordberg said the handset has been popular with consumers and operators around the world. The firm released the Xperia Play at the tail end of the first quarter, not having enough time to make any impact on its bottom line.
Even with the Xperia Play, Sony Ericsson needs to follow HTC's lead and release a bunch of Android phones that are desireable and rely on more than just the Sony Ericsson brand name. µ
Tags: Hardware
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Sony's legal rampage against PS3 "hackers", their releasing "updates" with disable the PS3 from running Linux, and their slow updates of "locked-down" versions of Android for their phones -- these moves do not exactly jibe with the mindset behind Google's free, open Android/Linux platform.
If Sony will sue it's own customers and lock-down PS3 consoles, then Sony/Ericsson's "locked-down" Android sales numbers decrease. Someone in Sony PR/Marketing may take notice of this...or not. I personally would not buy any Sony product.
Samsung on the other hand, who is not taking any #*$%&* from the lawsuit-happy Apple, has my vote.
They abandoned all their UIQ3/symbian users for no reason other than UIQ was being wasted by their management.
They could say "If we find a very serious flaw or performance issue, we will provide update" but no, they abandoned.
As a result, few developers caring for their platform including Opera who really outdone itself (se p1i) went into panic mode and abandoned working apps.
I wouldn't buy Android from 3 vendors. Sony, Samsung and Motorola.
Btw, they abandoned P1i updates while still selling them. So, very expensive high end Sony owners should do what? "yay they abandoned our working phone, lets throw away and buy android"?
Sony-Ericshit thought they can switch to Android and release it crippled and bloated with their "partners adware" like they do on laptops since ever.
Well, that did not work very well , and we can now see that those who lock bootloader and cripple android OS will quickly disappear from the market at all.
Praises go to HTC and Samsung and ZTE for making great devices and having great software optimization engineers.
Sony clearly has most stupid software engineers on the planet, if they could ruin the otherwise perfect AndroidOS.
I.E. if u buy ANY sony phone you will notice that their customization makes it slow, crashing and ugly.
So let the market decide who survives and who dies.
I clearly vote for Sony-Ericshit to die.
Yep, they are doing so poorly that they even made a small profit. Who cares that everyone was expecting they'd post a _negative_ result? But hey, who am I to rain on your parade, don't let small facts like that get in the way of a good bashing.
hardly suprising.
just look at the drivel they where putting out before the iPhone forced this industry to change.
WAP anyone?
I hope they can catch up and do something inovative. It would be a shame to see all those investors out of pocket and all those people out of jobs.