Sony considering buyout of Sony Ericsson

Reports indicated the Sony plans to buy out the remaining 50% of their joint venture with LM Ericsson Telephone Co. formed last 2001. Sony is reportedly prepared to pay Ericsson $1.3 billion to $1.7 billion to gain full control of the partnership.

There’s a couple of reasons why Sony wants the buyout. One, Sony Ericsson is losing market share for quite sometime now and it will continue to drop as the demands for high-end phones are declining. The popularity of Experia smartphones remains low. The direction of both companies seems to be going different paths – Sony is focussing more on the consumer products like tablet, PC, game consoles, TV, cameras and some other businesses while Ericsson on the other hand is more on the telecommunication-network equipment and is more focussed on the business-to-business market.

Should HP spin off its PC unit?

When Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced its plan to spin off its Personal Systems Group (PSG) and get out of the PC business, customers and analysts were asking why would a company give up its leading position in a major hardware segment – especially if the business is still profitable?

Aside from the spin off announcement, Former HP CEO Leo Apotheker also announced that HP will stop selling its HP Touchpad and smartphones plus it will drop WebOS, the operating system HP acquired from Palm for $1.2 Billion sometime 2010. Leo also announced HP’s acquisition of enterprise software Autonomy ror $10.2 Billion in cash. These announcements caused HP a lot of problems. Leo was relieved of his post and HP board said the company had to make a leadership change because HP has been missing financial targets, botched communications, lost credibility with Wall Street. But I think Leo was relieved because of the announcements he made.