Its buyout of the half of the Sony-Ericsson smartphone business it did not own was a mistake. The unit’s products run well behind those from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and Samsung and they struggle in a pack that includes LG, Motorola, HTC and Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). Sony’s camera and television operations cannot recover. Camera sales have been hurt by smartphones that have cameras of their own — good ones. TVs and screens have become a commodity, and the low-margin manufacturers are in China and Korea, not in Japan where labor costs are fairly high.
Finally, Sony’s game operation faces greater and greater competition from rivals Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Nintendo. This is another market in which smartphone products have started to supplant those that run on consoles and handheld gaming devices.
Douglas A. McIntyre