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http://www.forbes.com/busines[....]ire/2004/02/24/rtr1273047.html

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CANNES, France, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Sony Ericsson signalled on Tuesday that its mobile phone sales continued to boom in the first quarter as its newest handsets caught on with consumers, and said it was squeezing more benefits from its alliance.

"We started 2004 with very strong continued momentum," the Swedish-Japanese venture's President Katsumi Ihara told Reuters in an interview.

The mobile phone industry enjoyed a stellar fourth quarter, with sales rising 24 percent to 159 million units compared with a year earlier, and investors are looking for clues that this can continue in the traditionally much slower first quarter.

The global market share of the mobile handset joint venture between Sweden's Ericsson and Japan's Sony Corp held steady at 5.3 percent in 2003, according to market research group Strategy Analytics, after a long slide in previous years before the companies joined forces.

"With our new phones, we have built momentum," Ihara said, adding that the firm's T610 GSM model was the most popular camera phone in the GSM markets, which account for 80 percent of the world's 1.2 billion cellular phone subscribers. The venture, which returned to modest profitability in the third quarter of last year after years of heavy losses, would remain profitable this year, Ihara said.

"We like to be profitable for the full year. We have high expectations for that. The first quarter will also be profitable," he said at the fringes of the 3GSM World Congress, the mobile industry's biggest annual trade show.

Sony Ericsson would focus on bringing attractive handsets with high profit margins to consumers, rather than focusing on gaining market share in volume terms. But Ihara nevertheless expected his company to "improve" its market position.


EXPORT JAPANESE FEATURES

One of the ways the world's fifth-largest handset maker would do this was by more aggressively exporting advanced features from the Japanese mobile phone market to European and other GSM markets around the world.

"If you look at the top five, Sony Ericsson is the only company with a substantial business in Japan. What is required in the Japanese market will come to the GSM market later," he said.

Sony Ericsson would start with exporting some advanced features of its Japanese models, which include high resolution digital cameras not seen in GSM models yet.

"We like to shorten the time difference between Japan and GSM markets, for example in camera applications," he said.

Sony Ericsson was starting to benefit from the fact that it has two different parents with different backgrounds, he added.

Sony's strength in video, design, product planning and consumer markets means that the cameras in Sony Ericsson's phones can deliver better quality pictures. "There are 600 parameters to optimise in a camera. We made 650,000 photo prints to make these (Japanese camera) phones," Ihara said.

The company said it planned another major picture phone launch next month, and had already combined features of Sony's popular PlayStation video game console to its handset line-up.

Meanwhile, Ericsson's know-how in mobile network technology, as the world's biggest wireless infrastructure provider with a 30 percent global market share, has resulted in a stable multimedia handset for third-generation networks. That model, announced one year ago, will be in the shops next month, Ihara said.

Ihara also said that mobile phone software company Symbian, in which Sony Ericsson owns a substantial minority stake, "should remain an open and independent company".

Nokia, the world's top mobile handset maker, said two weeks ago it planned to buy a majority stake in Symbian, but it emerged on Monday that smaller shareholders, which include almost all of the world's big handset makers, objected to this.

Symbian's user interface UIQ, which Sony Ericsson uses on its P900 multimedia organiser phone, "is equally important to Sony Ericsson as a differentiating factor," Ihara added.

Copyright 2004, Reuters News Service

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Posted: 2004-02-24 13:28:44
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Conclusion: The Z1010 will be available next month!!!!
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Posted: 2004-02-24 13:40:04
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No mass production, thats the reason why the P900, Z600 and specially the Z200 are always OUT OF STOCK. It is hard to find these mobiles in the shop these days.

Mega-pixel camera's on SE phones, that was that phone in the video.

Let it come SE, let it come, ...

SE is not interested in mass production, its a to high risk if the models don't sell. But knowing SE is one of the only manufacturors that makes profit. I think SE is building slowly to the top. MAking there phones gadgets, not much seen things on the streets.


BTW; in Belgium Siemens is n° 2 now. Not that far behind NOkia.
Samsung 3, SE 4
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Posted: 2004-02-24 14:00:47
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my favourite part
> The company said it planned another major picture phone launch next month, and had already combined features of Sony's popular PlayStation video game console to its handset line-up.
so i guess we can stop all the rumours that se is going to introduce the T610 successor at cannes gsm world

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Posted: 2004-02-24 14:12:45
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well yeah and maybe we will see gsm so505is
it sure sounds like that all that talk about closing the gap between japan and europe...
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Posted: 2004-02-24 15:11:44
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Gsm so505? That would be cool. This message was posted from a WAP device
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Posted: 2004-02-24 15:15:26
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Yeah, give us some love with GSM version of So505is

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Posted: 2004-02-24 15:57:44
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It can be named p505:-) This message was posted from a WAP device
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Posted: 2004-02-24 16:00:15
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i think they'll launch the T330 just like the launched the T310 last year. i think it would be better to launch that SO505 for europe
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Posted: 2004-02-24 16:38:18
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The succesor of the T310 is the t230..and the article si just great.The phone they expect is the z1010, not the T650.IMHO
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Posted: 2004-02-25 00:06:05
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