Sony Mobile to “defocus” on India and USA

Sony Corporation recently held an investor day, which took place in Tokyo, Japan. The investor day provided an opportunity for Sony management to update the markets across all segment areas of its business. As always, we were mainly focused on Sony’s plans for its smartphone business and we came away with some interesting titbits.

We have known for a while that Sony’s product strategy revolves around the premium smartphone segment. One slide below highlights the opportunity, showing that there are very few competitors in the premium segment ($250+) versus the entry/mid-tier segments.



However, what hasn’t been made clear up until now is that Sony Mobile also has a regional strategy. Sony did say previously that it was refocusing on certain geographies, but never made it clear exactly which regions it would target. Sony has now confirmed that it expects to defocus on select regions – it explicitly says it expects its businesses in India, USA, China and Brazil to shrink.

Part of the reason for this is that Sony expects FY15-17 CAGR smartphone growth from India, China, Brazil, Indonesia to be just 0.3%. This compares to Sony’s estimate last year of +8.1%, showing just how much expectations have changed in a year.

Sony will instead look to focus its growth on East Asia (including Japan), Europe and the Middle East. Sony expects to ‘preserve’ its Latin American business and other Asia Pacific regions. You can check out the rest of the slides below, although we don’t learn too much else that we didn’t already know.

So if you are a Xperia fan from one of the regions that Sony plans to ‘defocus’ on, how does this news make you feel? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.