After the performance of "waist chop", Sony stepped on the "throttle"

Text/Leju Finance Jin Wenyu

In order to reflect the emphasis on technology, there is an unwritten rule within Sony that sony presidents must alternate between marketing talent and technical talent. To this end, every Sony president pays special attention to the revolutionary products with Sony characteristics launched during his tenure.

Under Kenichiro Yoshida, the Sony Group is also looking for ground for innovation, trying to nurture new areas of long-term growth.

"With imaging, sensing, cloud computing, 5G and entertainment, we believe Sony is well positioned to redefine mobility." Kenichiro Yoshida said at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this year, adding that Sony plans to make cars under its own brand, not just provide technology to other automakers.

As a result, Sony has also determined its own new development direction - car manufacturing. At the same time, Kenichiro Yoshida also announced that he will set up an operating company called Sony Mobility Inc. (Sony Mobility Company), through which he plans to explore entering the electric vehicle market in the spring of 2022. Currently, Sony is developing an electric vehicle called VISION-S.

Sony Mobility aims to make the best use of AI and robotics to help achieve a world where everyone can live in harmony with robots, and its businesses mainly include VISION-S, autonomous entertainment robot aibo, and drone Airpeak.

Rim groping

Sony has obviously been groping for a long time about building cars. It also has a lot of technical accumulation in the entire industrial chain of new energy vehicle manufacturing.

It is understood that in 2017, Sony released the electric concept car SC-1, which is an electric concept car in the shape of a square box. According to Sony, the car is an experimental vehicle, a new mobility tool for exploring a different car. At that time, after the news of the SC-1 concept car came out, the industry also speculated that Sony would lay out the field of new energy vehicles. But with the SC-1 concept car silent, this speculation is also lost.

In 2019, Sony announced that it will officially mass-produce the SC-1 concept car for use in leisure industry cooperation or amusement park vehicles. However, because the car is quite different from the real passenger car, it has not attracted much attention.

Until CES in 2020, Sony released a concept electric sedan Vision-S EV, and even posted on Sony China's Weibo: "Come on, try to test your driver's license!" Speculation about Sony's attempt to enter the car-making army began to emerge again.

In December of the same year, Sony began public road testing in Europe, validating the safety of image and sensing technologies installed inside and outside the vehicle, as well as the user experience of human-machine interface (HMI) systems.

The car is equipped with 33 sensors designed for autonomous driving, multiple widescreen displays, 360 Audio music technology and uninterrupted connectivity inside and out, but it is only at the demonstration level. Sony said the company is committed to the research and development of autonomous driving technology, VISION-S is only used to "show the application of Sony technology in the automotive industry", Sony has no intention of building cars. ”

Although there are repeated denials, Sony's actions in building cars are indeed becoming more and more intensive. At this year's CES, Sony not only disclosed the latest progress and future direction of Vision-S, but also unveiled a new prototype - a new concept all-wheel drive seven-seat electric SUV called Vision-S 02. The car is equipped with the same electric vehicle cloud platform as the previously released prototype VISION-S 01, and has also begun public road testing.

Performance growth is weak

Sony was founded in Japan in 1946. From a small company with no name to a world brand that everyone knows, Sony is well known to the public with many of its technology products, such as color TV, 4K screen and other television and imaging equipment; Walkman, noise-canceling headphones, audio equipment that can record DSD formats, etc., especially Sony's game consoles, has created a new era of games. Even Jobs has repeatedly said in public that Apple wants to learn from Sony.

But Sony is not good at building an intelligent ecosystem, as can be seen from its mobile phone business. As we all know, Sony has long been involved in the mobile phone business, however, among Sony's many businesses, the smartphone business is the most difficult to say.

The only strength that its smartphones can handle is the audio and video experience dominated by the mobile phone camera. As the world's largest supplier of image sensors, almost all mobile phone brands are currently using Sony's cameras, and Sony can make money lying by selling mobile phone parts. But Sony has to insist on making its own mobile phones.

But since the launch of the Xperia Z in 2013, Sony's phone styling has gradually solidified. When the domestic mobile phone is extremely ingenious, to fast charging, wireless flash charging, large batteries, under-screen fingerprints and other multi-directional development, Sony still implements the conservative design of the large square face, high forehead and long chin, and the functional layout is also unmoving, even the full screen, digging screen and other technologies have tried to be slow, and its poor operating system has dissuaded most consumers.

Under market pressure, Sony's mobile phone business continues to shrink. From seventh in 2013 with global sales of 38 million units and a market share of 3.8%, to fiscal 2020 (as of March 2021), 2.9 million units shipped, with a market share of less than 0.5%, Sony mobile phones have experienced losses for several years.

At the same time, with the development of 5G technology in recent years, Sony's main business has also been impacted to varying degrees. Sony's first-quarter fiscal 2021 financial report showed that its PS4 shipments fell by 1.4 million units from the same period in the previous fiscal year; the total sales of PS5 and PS4 gaming software in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2020 were 63.6 million units, down 27.8 million units from the same period in the previous fiscal year.

Not only that, Sony's financial report for the second quarter of fiscal 2021 showed that its net profit attributable to shareholders was 213.1 billion yen, down 54% from 458.6 billion yen in the same period last year. From 2020 onwards, Sony's most profitable business will mainly come from games and music, but its electronics and solutions business, imaging and sensing solutions business will grow weakly.

In desperation, Sony can only find new performance growth points, and gradually transform into a comprehensive entertainment group, and now games and music are becoming its main performance drivers. At the same time, Sony is also constantly increasing the in-car market.

The market positioning is vague

The logic of Sony's car manufacturing is similar to that of Apple, Xiaomi, Huawei and other car manufacturers. After all, the profit margin of consumer electronics is higher than that of the automobile manufacturing industry, and in the automotive industry, the profit margin of suppliers is also higher than that of the whole vehicle manufacturer. Although the news of Sony's entry into the car has attracted much attention, the two model products brought by Sony have not caused much sensation.

According to Sony, VISION S is not built by Sony itself, but brings together many partners around the world to create products, including Qualcomm, NVIDIA, ZF, Bosch and Magna and other upstream and downstream supply chain giants, once regarded as the "star model" created by the "star team".

However, in the industry's view, in addition to the unique brand logo, these two products can only be regarded as decent in terms of shape design and interior layout. Some voices believe that its design draws on the characteristics of some new energy mass production models in China, and even triggered speculation that Sony wants to conquer China's new energy vehicle market.

It is understood that in 2021, the sales volume of Japanese cars will be 4.448 million units, while the monthly sales of new energy vehicles (EVs and PHEV) in Japan will be only 3,000-4,000 units. Although the market space is huge, it is still unknown whether consumers are ready to accept new energy vehicles. It can be said that Japan still lacks the "consumption scenario" of new energy vehicles.

Exactly where sony's market is headed is unknown. But according to Kenichiro Yoshida, Sony's VISION-S model has already been tested in Europe and is the first production car based on the 5G cloud platform. He hinted that the so-called concept car is actually quite mature and quite close to mass production.