New Xperia from rosy Sony

Sony is set to launch yet another premium-end smartphone during the second half of 2013 in India, as the Japanese giant strives to pose serious challenge to Samsung and Nokia in the fast expanding smartphone market in the country. Vivek Sinha reports.

Sony is set to launch yet another premium-end smartphone during the second half of 2013 in India, as the Japanese giant strives to pose serious challenge to an aggressive Samsung and a resurgent Nokia in the fast expanding smartphone market in the country.

Sony had only last month launched its waterproof Xperia Z smartphone in India priced at ₹38,990.

The company said the customer's response to the Xperia Z has been "more than expected" and added that it has sold close to 40,000 Xperia Z units over the last twenty days since the smartphone's launch in the country.

Sony now intends to keep the sales momentum going at full strength through new smartphone offerings.

"We expect to launch another premium end smartphone in the Xperia series sometime later this year," said Kenichiro Hibi, managing director Sony India.

Hibi, however, refused to divulge further details such as the price point or phone's features and only reiterated that the company will bring it "very soon".

The company has set itself a target to triple its smartphone sales revenue to ₹3,500 crore in India.

Hibi further explained that Sony is gearing up to counter stiff competition from smartphone market from an extremely aggressive Samsung, Nokia, Apple and BlackBerry.

He added that the company is taking the right steps. "We will very soon introduce an EMI scheme to ease the purchase of our smartphones."

The company has also tripled its Xperia marketing budget to ₹300 crore for the current year and is aiming to double the sales point to 8,000, from the present around 3,000, by the end of this year.

According to latest data released by research firm CyberMedia, Sony unseated BlackBerry to occupy the third slot in terms of smartphone market share in India.

The research further reveals that Sony has 8.2% market share in the smartphone segment wherein Samsung and Nokia occupy the first and second slots with 43.1% and 13.3% market share respectively.