Sony probably still hasn’t recovered from the whole hacking, leaking and The Interview brouhaha the past few weeks, but it seems like other rumors about the state of several of their businesses have been floating around. After selling their VAIO personal computer business just last year, the murmurs are saying that their mobile and TV business will be up for sale pretty soon, if things don’t drastically change.
If you’ve followed business news, it won’t come as a surprise, given the state of their business profits the past few years. But the speculation over what businesses will eventually be sold became ripe when during the recently concluded CES 2015, Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai, dropped this statement as a warning to investors, “Electronics in general, along with entertainment and finance, will continue to be an important business, but within that there are some operations that will need to be run with caution – and that might be TV or mobile, for example”.
Sources close to management have told news agency Reuters that “no business is forever” and that no division is safe from being sold. This, despite the fact that Sony has continually emphasized that mobile will remain their core business model. In fact, they have not made huge steps, but they have been quietly trying to stake a claim in the US market. The QR lens and the Smartwatch 3 have huge potential to expand their presence in mobile.
But is it all a case of too little too late? Already, they can’t keep up with their competitors like Motorola, Samsung who are all producing both high end and entry level devices while Sony mostly has high end flagship gadgets. The TV division has actually become a standalone entity already, so selling it eventually may not be such a difficulty for the Japanese electronics giant. The question now is whether their mobile division can withstand the barrage of competition from other OEMs.
