Sony reported its first quarter results earlier today for the three months to 30 June 2012. In terms of the headline numbers, whilst group revenues rose by 1.4% to ¥1.52tn the company reported a quarterly loss of ¥24.6bn (£202m) compared with a ¥15.5bn in the same period last year. The full-year earnings forecast was also lowered to a ¥20bn profit (from ¥30bn) due to foreign exchange rates and weak global demand.
Anyway, we’re interested in the mobile smartphone performance here and to that end the company reported Q1 sales of ¥171.1 billion for the mobile communications division. Overall, Sony Mobile sold 7.4 million Xperia smartphones over the three-month period, this compares to 3.5m Xperia shipments in the same period last year. The company specifically talked about a “the strong performance of Xperia S and Xperia acro HD”. This led Sony to upgrade the FY13 (year to March 2013) forecast of smartphones shipped from 33.3 to 34 million units. Overall a good result and it will be interesting to see how the shipments shape up over the second half of this calendar year with the number of Xperia smartphones now on sale along with new flagships to be launched.
