Sony Ericsson remains bullish despite volatile global market

CEBU, Philippines – Sony Ericsson maintains bright prospects for its Philippine operations this year despite the volatility of the market brought about by the global economic meltdown.

“According to third party agencies, the total market here in the Philippines for mobile phone units has not shrunk yet although entry level phones have been shrinking. We in Sony Ericsson have been constantly reviewing the market and our targets but we continue to hold a positive outlook for the year because we seem to be over the very difficult part of the economic crunch,” said Patrick Larraga, Sony Ericsson marketing manager.

Larraga said they are even coming up with new product offerings for the market this year which they deem would keep the interest of consumers to their brand and their different phone categories.

Sony Ericsson executives were in Cebu recently to launch its nationwide “Spread the Smiles” campaign that aims to collect a million digital smiles to raise one million pesos as donation to the UNICEF which was held in partnership with SM Supermalls and Digiprint.

The campaign was launched last May 13 and will end in July 30 involving nine SM malls which include: SM Mall of Asia, SM North Edsa, SM Manila, SM Megamall, Pampanga, Baguio, Cebu, Iloilo, Davao where Sony Ericsson experience smile booths are being set up to collect smiles for the campaign and donation for UNICEF.

Larraga said that the first leg of their campaign started around Metro Manila, which already yielded thousands of smile photos and they went to Cebu and different parts of the country to take the campaign notch higher.

Since the campaign is also a contest amongst the nine SM malls, SM City Cebu is targeting to achieve a quota of around 100, 000 smiles for the one week run of campaign.

Larraga said that they are looking at this campaign two ways and that is as a corporate social responsibility and as a way to boost up their sales because it highlights their Cybershot phones’ smile shutter feature.

“We are propagating a timely message since everybody seems to be talking about recession and it has been difficult for most of us to smile these days. This campaign is a corporate social responsibility because it’s done for a worthy cause. At the same time it can be considered a marketing strategy in one because it highlights the product feature of our phones and we hope that it can impact on our sales especially on our Cybershot phones,” said Larraga.

He said that so far, their Cybershot phones have been selling well here in the Philippines next to their strongest selling Walkman units.

For the first quarter of the year, Sony Ericsson’s Cybershot phones have already sold about three million units worldwide, he said.

Larraga said that although they do not have an exact figure, Cebu as a market for Sony Ericsson is the second biggest next to Manila and they are confident that they have been able to establish a strong presence in the area having opened two experience shops here.