New Captain on Deck at Sony Ericsson
Posted by geoffwhiting on December 8, 2007
In a Wireless Watch report on a new CEO taking over Sony Ericsson, Caroline Gabriel says:
Sony Ericsson’s new man, 64-year-old Hideki Komiyama, has a hard act to follow, taking the reins from Miles Flint last month.
Like Nokia, Flint focused on branding, and made Sony Ericsson the most successful handset maker on this front by leveraging the Sony Walkman and Cybershot tags. His successor aims to make even greater capital out of those brands, and possibly also Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) gaming device, while also copying Nokia’s shift into multimedia Web services.
Komiyama, a Sony veteran, faces “a daunting challenge,” as consultancy CCS Insight puts it. The area of the market where the company has thrived – multimedia smartphones – is now one of the most competitive, and the move to low-end models remains high risk for a company that, despite its 35% increase in earnings in the first three quarters of this year, cannot leverage the economies of scale or the efficiencies of Nokia.
Komiyama’s initial decisions will focus around software and services, as he bids for an influential position in the evolution of mobile Internet platforms. The Web services strategy has been launched around the PlayNow music system, and will make strong use of the Sony brands, but needs further refining in functionality if it is to compete with Nokia Ovi. The new CEO will also need to streamline the operating system policy – it uses Symbian OS in only 18% of phones, in contrast with Nokia’s 53%, which gives the latter an advantage in efficiency, developer support and time to market. However, Sony Ericsson also needs to make decisions about what to do about Linux and other emerging factors like Google Android, while also chasing a more prominent position for its UIQ user interface, which it shares in a joint venture with Motorola, and which needs to be more aggressively enhanced and marketed to operators and licensees, if it is to make an impact on the ambitions of Nokia Series 60 to be a de facto standard.
