It's actually a terrible article.  It's not just about the brands, it's about the future health of the company.  To talk about the future health of the company without even mentioning it's most profitable divisions is crazy.  Things are bad enough at Sony without having to exaggerate.

Sounds like you need to re-read it.

if you follow those markets you would know that while the xperia brand is growing it isn't enough
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2665715

they are beaten by the chinese easily.. that one of the problems Sony has to deal with.. and probably not gonna win cause the Chinese can build much cheaper..

Camera's is also a problematic market for Sony if they don't up their professional line.. digital camera's are being replaced by, ironicly, Smartphones at a rapid rate: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324251504578580263719432252


Sony was 2nd in digital camera's a few years back but went third in a shrinking market..
While Sony is doing better then a few years back, the competitors are doing much much better (expect with the PS4)

Yeah i agree with this. PS seems to be the only established brand name sony has left.

I'd argue though that Xperia has done well to stay relevant. Perhaps its not doing as well in the US but in the rest of the world its doing great.

If Sony does everything right with Xperia (and they have so far) then i think it will be a more important brand than Playstation in the long run.

Also Cybershot is doing okay and making a bit of a comeback. If you wanted to buy a pocket camera and did some research on the bet before you made your purchase you would find out that the best pocket camera by far is a cybershot camera. Pretty expensive though but at least its the best.

? it's about its technology brands.. there is even a line:

Yasunori Tateishi, who has written books on Sony's fall from grace, fears that eventually Sony will be reduced to its entertainment business such as music, movies and perhaps games.

The biggest problem is that Sony President Kazuo Hirai has been selling pieces of the company, instead of investing in the future as did his predecessors, including founder Akio Morita, he said.

Sony's technology brands are doing not too hot except for Playstation.. thats what the article is about... the article is even in the "tech"part of huffingtonpost..
Could you see a Sony without any tech products except for the Playstation? these guys gave us the Walkman.. and now they can't compete in the fields they were leading once..

That's quite an interesting overview, I had no idea Nokia was still that big (even though they're apparently shrinking fast?), nor that Apple accounted for such a relatively small part of the market. I knew Samsung is the dominant force, but I always reckoned (like most, I think), that Apple was comfortably in 2nd place. It's also pretty telling that several unfamiliar (Chinese, I assume) brands are above Sony on that list. Didn't expect that.

That was the total mobile phone market. If all those 37.6m sales of Sony are Smartphones and they sell no "dumb" phones anymore, they should have position 6 or 7 in the smartphone segment:

Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Vendor in 2013 (Thousands of Units)

But I agree, that they can't compete with the growth of Huawei, LG, Lenovo and ZTE.

What part did you find dumb?

That top chart is for the overall mobile market, which by recent figures is ~50% dumb phone (very low margin) and 30% ultra cheap android phones (again, low margin). Sony almost exclusively compete in the much higher margin mid to high end smartphone market, so overall marketshare means little. Not saying though that Sony mobile is all sunshine and puppy dogs, its still scrapping a profit at best, but it is improving and looking at solely marketshare is misleading.

The second chart makes the same mistake, yes digital camera sales are getting cannabilised by smartphone sales, but its the low margin point and shoot market thats getting gutted. The high end digital SLR market is basically unaffected because smartohones can't compete (and if someone tries to point to smartphone camera pixel count and say that they are competing knows nothing about photography), and its the high end market that Sony competes in. 

This has been Sony's strategic shift in the past two years, a recognition that they can't compete with the high volume low margin sectors of the market that LG and Samsung dominate, and a refocus on the high end. 

The fact that this article states and argues that playstation is the only thing Sony has left is in itself is dumb seeing as how any idiots will tell you that it's their insurance division thats keeping Sony alive. The article is mostly null and void for the most part seeing as how it has an obvious hole in it.

It does not matter. As long as the PS4 is successful, Sony Computer Entertainment will live on even if the rest of Sony dies or is being sold. In the worst (or best) case, maybe Nintendo could buy the computer entertainment division or they could create a joint venture and join forces, which would not be a bad thing.