Sony has had a rough time with its mobile phone division. In a recent financial results briefing, the Xperia business is the only one that’s posting smaller revenue numbers than last year. Despite this, Sony Group CFO Tao Lin has said that the brand is not leaving the smartphone market.
CNET’s Japan arm cites the executive as saying that the Xperia business is “a very important business for us”, per machine translation. She continued “communication technology is a very important technology that Sony has cultivated for a long time. We also want to continue to value our smartphone business”.
Sony’s rough patch in recent times with the Xperia business may ahve something to do with the issue surrounding the Xperia 1 VII. Following its launch, the company had to stop sales of the phone due to issues with random reboots and shutdowns. This was later identified to be hardware issues due to the faulty manufacturing process of its circuit board.
This can be further traced back to the company deciding to no longer assemble its own phones in-house. From there, it’s possible that the assembly of half of the Xperia 1 VII phones were done by third parties. But for now, it doesn’t look like the company is changing course, for better or worse.
(Source: CNET, Sony [1, PDF], [2])
