Recognition: Eric Zeman / Android Authority
- For the first time since 2017, the Sony Xperia Smartphone Division made a profit.
- However, the division also sold fewer phones than it did in the past decade: 2.9 million phones in all of 2020.
- Sony was able to make a profit by lowering costs and increasing the average selling price of its products.
Since 2014, Sony has sold fewer smartphones each year than the previous year. Sales fell so sharply that the entire smartphone division became a money pit that was only kept afloat by subsidizing Sony with profits from the highly lucrative gaming division.
However, this has changed slightly (via Xperia Blog). In Sony’s 2020 fiscal year, the Sony Xperia smartphone division posted profits of 27.7 billion Japanese yen (~ $ 254 million). This is the first time since 2017 that Sony has not lost any money selling phones.
Now one might think that this means that Sony sold more smartphones than in fiscal 2019. However, this is not the case. In fact, Sony sold fewer smartphones in 2020 than in the past decade: just 2.9 million units. For comparison, look at this table:
If the Sony Xperia division was selling fewer phones, how did it make more money? It did this by reducing the cost of making and selling these phones while increasing the average retail price. Apparently, even Sony was surprised at how well this strategy worked, and a senior executive found that on a profit call earlier today, results “exceeded our original expectations”.
Sony has already announced its 2021 flagships for this year: the Sony Xperia 1 III and the Xperia 5 III. Both phones will be available in the summer.