We knew Sony’s smartphone division was having a hard time but we never thought it was this bad. The Japanese tech giant has just revealed that it managed to sell only 600,000 smartphones in Q3 2019. That’s an extremely low figure for a company as big as Sony. In fact, it’s even less than half of what it sold last year (1.6M) in the same period.
600,000 sales in a quarter is a minuscule figure in the smartphone world, where companies like Xiaomi manage to sell the same amount in a minute! In fact, even newcomers like Realme have managed to ship 16 times this figure in the last quarter!
Sony’s performance is lower than its own estimates. The company initially expected to sell 5 million units in the fiscal year starting April 1, 2019, to March 31, 2020. However, in Q2 2019, it decided to revise this estimate to just 4 million units. And after seeing the weak sales performance in the previous quarter, it has now revised this figure to just 3.5 million units. To be honest, this is still an optimistic estimate. In the previous two quarters starting April 1, 2019, Sony has sold just 1.5 million units in total. So, it will have to sell a lot of smartphones in 2019’s holiday period to take the total up to 3.5 million by the end of March 2020.
Sony’s smartphone portfolio remains limited this year. Its most recent releases include the Sony Xperia 5 and the special Xperia 1 Professional Edition. So, it is relying on the older Xperia 10 lineup and the Xperia 5 series to push its sales in the current quarter.
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