Almost over

Column: Sony's journey from largest to non-existent

It has been a long journey for Sony, and it is not quite over yet.

Published 13 June 2025 - 15:02

The other week, Sony launched its latest mobile phone, the Xperia 1 VII. Those of us who have followed Sony noticed that they did not simultaneously release an Xperia 10 VII in the same way they did last year. The autumn Xperia V model was also absent in 2024, as Sony had gone from three mobile models a year to two, and now seemingly to one. Furthermore, at the time of writing, the Xperia 1 VII is only available to order from Sony's own website. Sony is now as close as one can get to being a former mobile manufacturer without actually being one.

It has been a long journey that began in parallel in Japan and Sweden. Before smartphones, Ericsson was for a time the largest mobile manufacturer before Nokia took the position. Sony, on the other hand, was a popular mobile manufacturer in Japan but not so much elsewhere. Together, they formed the joint company Sony Ericsson, which offered an entertaining journey.

Sony Ericsson made smartphones with Symbian as the system before Android came along but was relatively quick to switch over, and several times, before Samsung established its dominance, Sony had the hottest Android phones on the market. They also offered some interesting experiments like the tiny Xperia X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro, the latter of which had a slide-out keyboard.

Eventually, Sony bought out Ericsson and the phones became just Sony, but several thousand people still sat at the former Ericsson in Lund working on mobile development. The last major new initiative was when they launched the Xperia 1, 5, and 10, quirky mobiles with a long and narrow screen format without an embedded selfie camera. It is the seventh generation of Xperia 1 that Sony has now launched, but since last year they have also abandoned the long and narrow screen format.

Already earlier, since it became clear that they were in permanent decline, we wondered why Sony continued with mobile phones at all, and now when they barely sell the only mobile they have, the question mark is bigger than ever.

The answer is probably twofold. On one hand, they still want a seat at the table when the Android operating system is developed, because although they are a small manufacturer, they have significant interests in the platform in many other ways. Sony is one of the largest manufacturers of camera sensors for mobiles, and audio technology is another of their areas that is relevant for mobile phones. If Sony had not been a mobile manufacturer, they might not have gotten their LDAC technology for high-resolution audio in the mobile as part of the Android standard.

This probably also aligns with what is Sony's actual business area within mobile technology: Enterprise solutions. Sony uses 5G and custom-made communication devices similar to the Xperia 1 to connect video cameras that livestream sports broadcasts with high-resolution image quality at major sporting events worldwide. Sony is also one of the major film production companies that surely uses mobile technology during its film production. I have also been told about solutions from Sony in medical technology where medical equipment in large hospitals communicates with Sony's technology.

These things might have been possible to do without making mobile phones, but then they would only have been a customer to Google and the manufacturers of mobile chips, and not a partner. It probably doesn't cost much extra to make a mobile phone when you're already making a new device to stream video broadcasts.