Sony is reportedly eyeing up a deal to buy out Ericsson from the Sony Ericsson partnership
Sony is reportedly gearing up to fully acquire Sony Ericsson, claims the Wall Street Journal.
This would mean ‘Sony Ericsson’ as a brand name would no longer exist – the company would just be known as Sony. The joint venture between Sony and Ericsson began in 2001. The idea was that Sony would bring the technical know-how and Ericsson the infrastructure.
Post-2001, Sony Ericsson had some moderate success in the feature phone market but since then the company has failed to innovate and keep up with the likes of Samsung, HTC, Motorola and Apple.
Earlier this week Sony Ericsson’s CEO, Bert Nordberg, even admitted that the company had been caught out by the rise in popularity of the original Apple iPhone.
‘The buyout would give Sony full control of the mobile phone company,’ says Into Mobile, ‘including the mobile patent portfolio and the move could cost up to $1.7 billion.’
It added: ‘the move would allow Sony to really dive into the fast-growing smartphone space with all of its efforts and it would allow the company to have a complete ecosystem.’
Sony also just released its first tablet devices – the Tablet S and the Tablet P – which have received extremely positive reviews since they launched last month. Could this be the start of Sony’s mobile initiative? Are Sony-branded smartphones next in line?
We’d hope so. Sony is in a very attractive position to create some extremely useful devices. For instance, the company makes TV’s, PlayStations, PSP devices and tablets. If it could produce a handset that somehow manages to link with all of these things, much like Microsoft is doing with Windows Phone 7, it could be on to something big.
So far the tip of Sony Ericsson’s innovation has been the Xperia Play (AKA: the PlayStation phone). But seeing as this has sold about as well as sandbags in the desert, we’re generally quite excited about the prospect of Sony going out on its own.
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