Sony Ericsson said on Thursday it would launch three new handsets on the market early in the fourth quarter, unveiling details of new products designed to help stall a slump in mobile phone sales.
One of the products, the Satio, is a renamed version of the Idou phone that the Swedish-Japanese company originally announced at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
It will be joined by two other new handsets, the Aino and the Yari, as part of the company’s strategy to beef up its line of products that merge communication and entertainment.
The Satio has a 12 megapixel camera, free access to Hollywood movies and a touch-screen keypad, while the Yari is hands-free gaming focused and the Aino concentrates on music and videos.
NEW
“This is a new Sony Ericsson you see before you today,” Steve Walker, vice president of marketing at Sony Ericsson Mobile, said at the launch in London.
“It’s taking all the things we have become ... and taking a big step beyond,” Walker said.
Sony Ericsson, the world’s fourth-biggest maker of mobile phones, has been struggling amid a wider downturn in mobile phone sales.
Overall handset sales fell 8.5 percent in the first quarter of this year, research firm Gartner Inc said.
“Mid-market” phones — such as Sony Ericsson’s patch — suffered the steepest decline.
DEMAND
In contrast, demand for so-called smartphones such as the iPhone and Nokia’s 5800 is growing, with sales forecast to lift some 27 percent this year.
The new Satio is also a smartphone.
Sony Ericsson posted a 293 million euro (US$413 million) loss in the first quarter as demand for its handsets fell by around 35 percent, which the company attributed to the global financial crisis.
JOB CUTS
The Sony Corp and LM Ericsson AB joint venture said it was aiming to return to profitability “as quickly as possible,” but also announced an additional 2,000 job losses to trim costs.
Those cuts add to 2,000 layoffs that were part of a previous savings program. Combining the two represents about 30 percent of the company’s workforce.
Separately, Sony and Panasonic Corp will sell their mobile phone handset sales operations to ITX Corp, an Olympus Corp subsidiary.
ITX, 82.1 percent held by Olympus, said yesterday in a statement that it would pay Sony ¥5.6 billion (US$58 million).
Panasonic will receive ¥900 million for the transfer, the statement said.
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