Sony Mobile has not been doing well lately compared to other mobile giants. Their partnership with Ericsson turned out to be a flop and now they are planning to restructure in the coming months. They are moving their main headquarters from Lund, Sweden to Tokyo, Japan in October. This is not surprising since Sony’s new president Kaz Hirai, some of you may know him being one of the leaders of the Playstation team until his new presidential role, currently resides in Tokyo. They are also laying off 1000 jobs globally, which is about 15% of their staff for the next two fiscal years. A file for redundancy had to be put in place for Swedish authorities to let people know that 650 employees are significantly affected by this move. Sony Mobile is changing their core focus to software and application development instead of producing more phones to compete with iOS and Android devices. Lund won’t be completely abandoned though as Sony still plans for their offices there to be a development hub.

Sony Ericsson has been no more for a while since Sony completed the buyout of Ericsson’s shares earlier this year. Ericsson was completely dissolved to be the re-branded Sony Mobile. Some of Sony’s higher ups in their corporate staff have stepped down and there has been a reshuffling process going among those who are still there throughout the year. In general, Sony as a whole has been on a downward spiral since their electronics and chemical divisions have been disappointing from a sales perspective. More notably from the electronics division, their TV business just has not been doing that well compared to the rest of their competition there. They also had to sell their whole chemical products business as part of their big restructuring. Sony Mobile hopes to bounce back from all of this since they have redefined the roles of their multiple locations in Lund, Tokyo, and Beijing to improve their market efficiency and integration with other Sony divisions. We shall see if this restructuring plan works for Sony as they try to bring themselves back to profitability.