Staying competitive in the smartphone business nowadays is almost impossible unless you are able to create Apple iPhone like magic with the features like OnePlus offers at a jaw-dropping price. Sony, once the global leader in electronics, is learning it in a hard way.
It has been one more frustrating year for Sony’s Mobile division with overall shipments expected to decrease for the third straight year. Indeed it is a piece of terrible news for Sony, but more frustrating for its employees, as Sony has planned to decrease costs by laying off up to half of its 4,000 employees in the versatile mobile division by 2020.
The move to cut down its workforce could see up to 2,000 executives from the mobile division lose their jobs. In order to keep the impact minimal, Japanese workers could be shifted to different divisions, while employees in Europe and China will be offered deliberate retirement. Another change Sony is making is restricting telephone deals in South East Asia, and rather concentrating on the East Asia and European markets.
In the wake of reports that Sony is producing just a little more than US$4 million in revenue from its struggling mobile phone business, the company is as yet working at a misfortune for the third straight year. With the possible new strategy to decrease fixed costs by half, the company is very much optimistic to bring its mobile business to profitability by 2020. On the flip side, it’s is estimated that the overall shipments of Sony phone would further decline to around 1.3 billion units in 2019.
Despite marking its presence in the electronics market, Sony has never been a noteworthy player with its mobile phones. The company accounted for just 3% of the mobile phone market in 2010, which has shrunk to a measly 1% in 2019. The company’s smartphone sales for 2018 alone are estimated to hover 6.5 million units, which is 50% lesser than the previous year and equals to just 17% of sales figures the company clocked five years ago.
Those numbers look very tiny in front of other players, for example, Apple, Huawei, and Samsung who claim a sizeable share of the smartphone shipments every year, and rest of the market dominated by Chinese sellers. As Sony finds itself not in a situation to compete with any of those players, the focus appears to bring its mobile phone division to profit.
As Sony is all set to reduce its workforce in mobile division, it would be interesting to see if the company can bear fruits from the division which is struggling for long.
