Miffed by poor sales and huge losses over the last few years, the electronics division of the popular Japanese manufacturer Sony has announced its plan to pull back from the television and smartphone market and focus instead on what it does best i.e. make PlayStations and services related to it. They hope to be able to improve the profitability of the company with this turnaround.
“We’re not aiming for size or market share but better profits,” Hiroki Totoki, Sony’s new mobile division chief, said during an investors conference, as reported by Reuters.
It has not been a good year for Sony so far. Earlier during the year, Sony had to sell its PC division VAIO. After that, the entire computer network of the company had got locked for a week due to hacker activity.
Only last month, Sony had announced an operating loss of $765 million, poor sales of Xperia handsets and consequently proposed changes in the management and the plans to cut down the staff by 15%. The losses of the mobile division were to the tune of $1.5 billion during the last quarter. Though the gaming segment of the company is also running into losses, amidst lower theatrical revenues.
The only Sony product which helped the company stay afloat was the Game & Network Services (G&NS) sales, particularly the PlayStation 4 which crossed the 10 million sales figure for sales across the globe during August.
“The PlayStation has been a consistent bright spot for Sony, even as it has lost ground in other markets: the company sold 3.3 million PS4s last quarter, exceeding combined Xbox 360 and Xbox One sales (2.4 million, taken together). Sony plans to increase sales in its video game division by a quarter, to $13.6 billion, within three years,” it was revealed.
Another successful product of the company are the image-sensors produced by them. they are used in iPhones and in many China manufactured handsets also. Sony hopes to push up the sales of its image sensors by 70% over the next year.
In the mobile segment, Sony plans to bring down the number of phone models, due to which Sony stands to lose out on a huge market share but earn profits inspite of that. Similarly, in the television segment, the company will again cut down on the number of models but step up efforts on movie and TV programming through which it hopes to come out of the rred in the coming three years.
Leave a Reply