How did the Sony Xperia lost the market despite having good products?

In this article we are talking about Sony smartphone market because Sony stopped its smartphone division in India and it occupies a trivial amount of share in global smartphone market.

Every year Sony launches its smartphones in 2 line-ups:

1. Flagship
2. Budget

Flagship category:

In this range of smartphones Sony launches 1 smartphone with 3 sub versions — normal, compact, premium. They branded this segment smartphones with Z then to XZ and now the number series.

These smartphones were true flagships with all cutting-edge specifications — latest high-end processor, flagship camera, waterproof etc.

Downside:

Their pricing is significantly high for normal average user.

Budget and premium budget category:

In this range of smartphones Sony has so many line-ups — C, R, E, L, X.

Budget range is the category in smartphones were the smartphones shipments is large. But Sony had a different approach, they focus mainly on flagships so to become iPhones of Android and utterly failed in this category.

Downside:

Most smartphones launched here offers low specs just like any other OEMs at that time but even after brands like Samsung, Redmi, etc. started taking over the market they didn’t change their business model.

The fall of Sony smartphone division:

Why Sony failed in the smartphone business?

1. Price — Their smartphone prices were high competing iPhones but most people spending that money simply invested that in an iPhone.
2. Specs — They offer specs which most flagships have but to beat the competition they didn’t offer any extraordinary things (except camera) which is followed by next one.
3. Innovation — They lack in this area which is more significant now than before. They didn’t even follow the trend that most other were doing instead they stick to their own similar to Nokia.
4. Design — No doubt they are most beautiful looking smartphones but they didn’t catch up with time nor they made the trend follow their style aesthetics and hence they remained single.
5. Camera — They are said to be camera-centric smartphones with great hardware but the real-life experience didn’t show up. Their benchmark scores didn’t beat other flagships like Huawei, Samsung, HTC and not even iPhone.

How did Sony lose their market share?

Apart from the above points the other factor which led to the fall is adaptability — with regards to design, and price.

In this growing smartphone business Sony wasn’t ready to change their business model i.e. competing with the new players like OnePlus.

OnePlus disrupted the smartphone industry with their price to specs ratio which was a big problem for most flagships but Sony didn’t seem to notice that or they didn’t want to.

As usual they launched new smartphones in flagship category with all camera centric features with a big price tag but with new smartphone line-up, that looks like old wine in new bottle.