According to Reuters, Sony's CEO, Howard Stringer, told German Die Welt that Sony and Ericsson need to start working together like they did two years ago. Back then, Sony Ericsson had seen steady long-term growth for five years, but recent financial reports have shown that the joint venture between Sony and Ericsson is struggling to maintain its market share. Last year, Sony Ericsson's two senior executives resigned, and Hideki Komiyama (Sony) and Anders Runevad (Ericsson) were promoted to President and Executive Vice President, respectively.
Now, we're not going to blame the new executives for the 2008 issues, as it takes longer than a few quarters to come up with viable products for the near future. However, coming up with viable products for the near-future has been a Sony Ericsson issue for quite a while now. A vital part of Sony Ericsson's business strategy has always been to offer high-tech consumer electronics combined with high-tech telecom solutions. One of the company's most recent innovations was to enable users to post pictures to blogs directly from Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot phones.
That was more than two years ago, though, and today, all the manufacturers are working hard to integrate Web services in their products. Google has even created an entirely new operating system with that as its main purpose. Moving forward, it's obvious what Sony Ericsson needs to do. Not because we know how to run a business like Sony Ericsson, but because the company itself has already made several new moves.
Just browse around some of the best-rated and hottest products on this site right now, and it becomes clear that Sony Ericsson is currently doing a pretty good job serving consumers. But, of course, there's always room for improvement, such as getting rid of proprietary standards and replacing them with universal standards like all the other competitors.
That said, when your hottest product right now is manufactured by Taiwanese HTC, we can fully understand that such outsourcing, especially if it works well, could cause internal problems. Imagine seeing HTC phones with Cyber-shot cameras and Walkman players. That would have solved a few multimedia capability problems for HTC, and quite a few carrier problems for Sony. On the other hand, as long as Sony is Sony, we can't imagine any better partner for telecom solutions than Ericsson. After all, who's getting all the credit?
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