Sony Ericsson posted a loss of 133 million euros (US$176.3 million) for the fourth quarter and offered investors a gloomy outlook for cell-phone sales in the year ahead.
The joint venture between Sony and LM Ericsson said it shipped 24.2 million handsets in last year’s final quarter — down six percent from the prior period and a 21 percent decline from one year earlier. Sony Ericsson President Dick Komiyama attributed the year-on-year sales drop to the global economic slowdown.
“In economic terms, 2008 has been a tumultuous year with world markets experiencing a serious downturn,” Komiyama said. “The mobile-phone market has been greatly affected by this and, as expected, the fourth quarter continued to be very challenging for Sony Ericsson.”
Meeting Expectations
Sony Ericsson’s latest sales numbers were in line with Gartner’s expectations, noted Carolina Milanesi, the firm’s research director for mobile devices. “It was what we were expecting, considering the weakness of the European market and the company’s struggling product-placement efforts in the U.S. market,” Milanesi said.
In particular, Milanesi said the company only had “two products driving sales” in the fourth quarter. These were the Xperia X1, Sony Ericsson’s long-waited Windows Mobile-based touchscreen device, and the Cybershot C905, the company’s first eight-megapixel camera phone, she noted.
Sony Ericsson said the average selling price for its handsets in the fourth quarter was 121 euros (US$160.37) — an increase the company attributed to currency fluctuations as well as an increase in sales of high-end phones such as the Xperia and the Cybershot. The company also maintained its global market-share estimate at around eight percent.
A Challenging Market
Milanesi said last November that the global economic downturn had triggered a three-way battle between Sony Ericsson, Motorola and LG for third place in the worldwide mobile-phone market. Though Sony Ericsson emerged…