Sony has just reported their fiscal Q1 2013 financial results (PDF). In calendar terms you and I can understand, it’s the quarter that spanned from the first day of April to the last day of June. In other words, Q2.
Now Sony is a big company, so I’m not going to cover everything they do, but I will focus on mobile. The company says they’ve shipped 9.6 million phones during the quarter (slide 14), which compares rather poorly to LG’s recent results of 12.1 million. Both companies are obviously outflanked by Samsung, but that’s another topic for another day. In terms of money, sales increased 36.2% year over year to a hair under $4 billion. As for profits, this time last year there weren’t any. Now there’s $60 million. Small, but better than nothing. Looking forward, can Sony become a big player? To me the answer is absolutely yes, but it’s going to take a ton of cooperation from each of the company’s divisions. Sony makes some of the best screens on the market, so why do Xperia phones have terrible displays? Sony makes some of the best camera sensors in existence, so why are Xperia phones always behind phones from Samsung and Apple? Rumor has it that the company will announce a new flagship phone next month called the Xperia i1. It’ll have a 20 megapixel camera, 5 inch 1080p screen, massive 3,000 mAh battery, and a Snapdragon 800 under the hood. Can it put the company back on the map? I certainly hope so.
