| Ten-year old's way down from the throne |
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Sony Ericsson tenth anniversary on Saturday. During that time the company has plummeted from third to tenth place among the world's mobile phone manufacturers. New Technology has examined mistakes.
Ericsson and Sony had high ambitions when the fall of 2001 merged its
mobile phone companies. Sony Ericsson would be one of the phone
market. And by 2005 or 2006.
That did not happen.
Prior to the merger, Ericsson's mobile phones three in the world. Now
Sony Ericsson has collapsed down to a tenth place, and crossed the lines
of companies that are not involved in mobile phones ten years ago.
Including Apple, HTC taiwan Kingdom, and the Chinese ZTE and Huawei.
Prior to the merger, Ericsson had lost up to 50 billion crowns on their
mobiles. Sony was wishful partner, a consumer electronics giant who
knew what ordinary people wanted. It showed not the least success with
the Walkman music player and games console Playstation.
After a shaky start, the company had two fantastic years, thanks to the
success of music phones, launched the brand Walkman. Good, it was also
for camera phones with Sony's Cybershot brand.
In 2006 and 2007 earned Sony Ericsson of SEK 25 billion, and Ericsson
CEO Carl-Henric Svanberg was overjoyed. "Sony Ericsson is larger than
Scania. There are not many people know," he said in an interview.
But the joy was short-lived. Sony Ericsson's decision to broaden the
portfolio, hire more people and also invest in low-cost models, was a
big mistake. It cost more than it tasted.
Another setback was that Sony refused to release the PlayStation brand.
Ken Kutarangi, father of Sony's successful video game console, put her
foot down, reportedly to new technologies.
Sony Ericsson blames a lot of their problems at Nokia. The
Swedish-Japanese company wanted to make Symbian an open operating system
back in 2006. Much like Google did with its successful Android.
But Nokia refused. Only in 2008, was Nokia's management has come to
open Symbian, says one of Sony Ericsson's previous managers.
The companies also had different opinions on touch screens. The
developers of Lund was convinced it was the way to go. But it was the
Finns who had power over the Symbian operating system.
The focus on Microsoft operating system Windows 2008 was another
strategic mistake. The idea was that the Xperia X1 mobile phone could
charm the U.S. market. But it flopped.
The operating system simply did not remember one of Sony Ericsson's engineers.
Between 2008 and 2009, Sony Ericsson losses of over 17 billion. Savings
programs succeeded each other, and over 4000 people were forced to
leave the company.
In early 2011 it looked brighter again. The company reported a small
profit for 2010, and the new flagship model Xperia Arc got rave reviews.
But as Japan was hit by the tsunami. Sony Ericsson was forced to
postpone several models, and Samsung managed to catch up with their top
model Galaxy II, a direct competitor to the Arc.
The results for the first six months shows once loss figures. It's tough to be small at such a competitive market. |
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