Sony buys off Ericsson’s share for about $1.47 billion

Sony buys off Ericsson’s share for about $1.47 billion

While addressing Internationale Funkausstellung (IFA ) in Berlin, Sony Chief Executive, Howard Stringer, confirmed on Thursday, October 27, that Sony is ending their mobile phone joint venture with Ericsson by buying off the latter’s 50 percent share for
about $1.47 billion, to be the sole owners of mobile phones themselves.

With the wrap -up of this collaborative venture of Sony and Ericsson, their 10-year-long association will reach the end. As has been confirmed by Sony today, now Sony Ericsson will be solely owned by Sony, who is ambitioning to gain complete ownership for
mobile phones subsidiary of Sony and getting it patent. It has been disclosed that the other patent rights will be bought with the cross-license deal with Ericsson.    

While talking about the latest happenings within Sony, Stringer said, "We can more rapidly and more widely offer consumers smartphones, laptops, tablets and televisions that seamlessly connect with one another and open up new worlds of online entertainment."

However, with the previous partnership, Sony was bound with Ericsson’s telecommunications technology and was slacking drastically in matching up to the latest smart phones’ rage.

With pretty late realisation to compete with the hiked up smartphone fever, Sony has now joined hands with Android partners with its Xperia line.

It was also revealed that Sony is aiming for another joint endeavour to set up “a wireless connectivity initiative to drive and develop the market’s adoption of connectivity across multiple platforms.”

Patent deal has been rumoured for quite some time, is speculated to unfold success for Sony in the near future.

However, combating the market competition with the presence of Apple, with iOS, against Samsung, a major user of Google’s Android operating system, will definitely add to the difficulty Sony may have to face.

Sony said, "The transaction also provides Sony with a broad intellectual property (IP) cross-licensing agreement covering all products and services of Sony as well as ownership of five essential patent families relating to wireless handset technology."

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Posted by sara.anwar on Oct 27 2011. Filed under Sci-Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry