Sony To Reenter U.S. Mobile Phone Market
(08/18/00, 1:04 p.m. ET) By Junko Yoshida , EE Times
Sony Corp. president and chief operating officer Fujio Nishida said
Thursday that the company would make a fresh foray into the
blooming market for mobile and personal network products, including
2.5G and 3G wireless phones for the United States market.
Though the consumer electronics giant exited the CDMA-based cell
phone business in the United States last year, "We cannot afford to
pass [up] the opportunity" for the emerging wideband-CDMA
business, Nishida said.
He stressed R&D as the key to Sony's effort.
"The mobile environment offers the ultimate, personalized
entertainment [space]," he said.
Sony (stock: SNE) decided to withdraw from the CDMA market
largely because the U.S. cell phone business is tightly controlled by
network operators, and "it's not a lucrative business unless you can
have huge economies of scale" in the manner of Finland's Nokia
(stock: NOK) or Sweden's Ericsson (stock: ERICY), Nishida said.
But once the wireless infrastructure begins to migrate to the wideband
era, "There is so much Sony can do" in terms of offering games,
digital images, and music over the wireless spectrum.
Vowing to get Sony back into the wireless-equipment business within
the next two to three years, Nishida said that a key to successful
re-entry will be wireless multimedia.
"We can also leverage Sony's entertainment content," he said.
After folding the company's CDMA operation, "We've kept the
engineers, who are now working in our laboratories in San Jose
[Calif.]" on next-generation development, Nishida said.
Sony is also committed to building a personal-network world based on
its proprietary Memory Stick products.
Although Sony claims that about 50 companies have licensed its
Memory Stick technology, it confirmed there are no third-party
products with Memory Stick slots on the market today, though several
Sony products incorporate it.
Memory Stick will not remain just a flash-based storage device,
according to Nishida.
Sony is planning to launch "some time next year" a new product called
Info Stick, which will integrate a Bluetooth-based transmitter and
receiver, he said.
Essentially a wireless transmission device, Info Stick will turn
handheld consumer products with a Memory Stick slot into
Bluetooth-enabled devices.
Sony is officially unveiling its first Palm-based Personal Entertainment
Organizer on Aug. 29. The product is slated for October launch in the
United States.
But Nishida said the OS from Palm Inc. (stock: PALM), Santa Clara,
Calif., will not be Sony's platform of choice for upcoming 2.5G and
3G wireless communication devices.
"We are using Palm just for this particular market at the moment," he
said. |
