For its next fiscal year starting in April 2014, and running through March 2015, Japanese OEM Sony has a goal. The company wants to ship 65 million smartphones over those 12 months which would be a 55% gain from the 42 million Xperia units expected to be shipped in the current fiscal year. The information comes from sources inside the vendor's supply chain.

Sony plans on offering more phones powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon processors and lower priced models that have MediaTek silicon inside. In addition, next year Sony will release its first smartphone powered by the Firefox OS. This model will be aimed at developing countries and the low to mid-range portion of the smartphone market. That, of course, will be in addition to the mid to high end Xperia models Sony will release, that are driven by Android.

The sources also indicate that Sony will be handing out orders to a trio of Taiwan based OEM/ODMs such as Arima Communications, Compal Communications and Foxconn/FIH Mobile. Each of those companies will be responsible for the production of 2-4 Sony Xperia handsets each. For fiscal year 2014, the three contract manufacturers will see orders from Sony increase 50% over the 2013 fiscal year, based on information from the sources.