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HUAWEI ships more phones in an average day than Sony sold in an entire quarter

Sony's mobile division is sinking fast enough that we're wondering if it will even exist in 2020.
By
October 30, 2019
sony xperia 5 rear 2

We will be the first to admit that Sony creates some amazing smartphones. However, for various reasons, the company isn’t doing so well at actually selling Sony smartphones. The company’s latest financial results for its second fiscal quarter —  or the general third quarter of 2019 — show some very concerning numbers.

According to the report (thanks to Phone Arena), Sony sold just 600,000 smartphones from the start of July to the end of September this year. To put that into perspective, HUAWEI shipped an average of 600,000 smartphones each day of this year to arrive at a total of 200 million units in late October.

Selling just 600,000 units in the quarter is a far cry from the company’s original estimates. Sony initially estimated it would sell 5 million Sony smartphones in the third quarter of this year, but then modified that estimate to 4 million after a particularly bad second quarter. Here we are though, with the actual numbers at just 12% of that original estimate.

Related: Sony WH-1000XM3 review: Still the best

With Sony smartphone sales declining at such a fast pace, it makes us wonder if the mobile division will even survive through 2020. We’ve already heard about the company shutting down plants, shifting division categories in a likely effort to hide its mobile losses, and also have heard about waves of layoffs. If the tide doesn’t turn soon, these kinds of strategies simply won’t work to support losses of this magnitude.

This is quite the shame as we really liked the latest Sony smartphone flagship, the Sony Xperia 1. But we’re not sure how the company is going to survive this.