Sony Mobile reports full year profit; expects sales growth next year

Sony reported results for the year ended 31 March 2017 earlier today, with Group sales down by 6% to 7.6 trillion yen and operating profits down by 2% to 289 billion yen. On the mobile side, Sony reported sales of 759 billion yen, along with full year profits of 10 billion yen.

It is great to see Sony back in the black, but this was mainly driven by restructuring cost initiatives, rather than top-line growth. The scale of the task that Sony is facing can be seen with how many phones it shipped during the fourth quarter – 2.9 million. It only sold a smaller amount when it first started selling Android smartphones with the Xperia X10 back in 2010.





Overall for the year, Sony sold 14.6 million smartphones. Sony is not anticipating any big turnaround for next year, forecasting 16.5 million smartphone shipments in FY17, a rise of 13%. Most of this increase is expected to land in Europe and the Middle East. Sony says this will lead to smartphone sales increasing by 8% to 820 billion yen.

Sony still expects to record a small profit next year of 5 billion yen, but it did warn that the smartphone business will become even more “severe” due in part to an increase in component pricing such as memory.

Thanks Diogo and Moisés!