While Motorola (MOT) was burning to the ground selling only 36 million handsets last quarter, Sony Ericsson’s profits rose 54% to $303 million on revenue of $4.3 billion, up 37%. Handset shipments rose 59% to 25 million.
Sony Ericsson (a joint venture between ERIC and SNE) now has 9% of the global handset market.
Over at Motorola, the company said it had sold only 35 million phones, down from almost 52 million in the same quarter a year ago. The company expects to report sales for the quarter ended June 30 were between $8.6 billion and $8.7 billion; it had forecast about $9.4 billion.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Motorola said that sales in Asia and Europe had been especially bad.
Sony Ericsson did exactly what Motorola did not do. Instead of betting sales on one hot line, the company marketed a number of smart phones designed to reach different parts of the high-end market. In Q2, it launched phones to reach the low and mid portions of the market like China, where handset price is a key to sales.
Motorola bet on the RAZR which won the battle for a couple of quarters, but lost the war.
Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected].
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