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Sitting drinking my coffee this morning I spotted a rather interesting interview given to Mobile Today by Nathan Vautier. Who is he some of you may ask? He’s Sony Ericsson’s head honcho in the UK & Ireland. The interview proved to be pretty interesting so I’ll give you the jist of it and cover some of the juicier points. The two main themes of the interview were essentially what SE would be doing this year and what they intended to do about the infamous quality control problems that have dogged them for the past year or so.

On the first point Mr Vautier was able to approach the question from a position of strength,. He made mention of the ‘Fab 5′ of course and reaffirmed that the X10 and Vivaz were key launch products for SE. He also mentioned that there would be a total of 16 new devices released in the UK & Ireland this year (including the Fab 5). That means we still have another 11 to go. Of course a number of them probably won’t be super high-end devices, indeed Mr Vautier made it clear that the Walkman brand was here to stay when he said that there would be a number of Walkman products from around the middle of the year and that they would be in the £100 range. That would indicate somewhere in the mid-range of the market.

Mr Vautier was also keen to point out that the overall portfolio this year, including some handset from last year, would be 26 handsets, which he hailed as a major reduction. This ties in with some opening remarks he made about how SE wasn’t going after market share or numbers. Of course they aren’t really in a position to go after marketshare or numbers at the moment, so there’s a bit of spin here, but the basic idea is sound.

In terms of quality Mr Vautier gave the answer that was pretty much expected of him … SE are taking steps to improve the situation. He gave some examples of how they’re doing that such as cutting the number of components they use to improve testing efficiency and restructuring their KPI system (key performance indicator) so that it focused on qualitative issues. He was eager to stress just how much work SE had done over the past 18 months to address the issues, but the proof is in the pudding as the saying goes. It’s easy enough to spot comments from concerned customers over upcoming products like the X10 so SE really do have to get these new handsets right first time to restore some of the confidence and trust they’ve lost.

You can read the full interview here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Opinion, corporative, interview, market-share. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.