Swedish-Japanese mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson launched five new color-screen picture-taking handsets on Tuesday, saying camera phones were the main driver behind sales growth for mobile phones in the industry.
Sony Ericsson, jointly owned by Japanese electronics group Sony Corp and Swedish telecom equipment maker Ericsson, said 55 million mobile phones with a camera were sold last year, exceeding sales of digital cameras themselves.
“Camera phones are driving mobile phone sales growth,” Per Alksten, head of Sony Ericsson’s product marketing in the Nordic region, told a news conference.
Sony Ericsson returned to profits in the last two quarters after a string of losses since its inception in October 2001 and said in February sales momentum in the first quarter remained strong and that it expected to stay profitable in 2004.
But with a market share of some six percent it is still a small player compared to the world’s biggest mobile phone maker Nokia and second biggest Motorola. Korea’s Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics and Germany’s Siemens are also bigger. All of them offer phones with cameras.
Sony Ericsson said it expected some 8.3 billion picture messages will be sent this year between mobile phone users worldwide, driving demand for camera-phones. As taking pictures with a phone becomes more popular, customers are keen on better quality of the snapshots, and phones sporting high resolution cameras have become a great success in Japan.
Among the new phones launched by Sony Ericsson on Tuesday is is the S700 handset which has a camera with a 1.3 megapixel picture resolution, good enough to make a small print. It will come to the European market in the fourth quarter. Its European competitor will be a phone made by Sharp for the world’s biggest mobile phone operator Vodafone.
Another Sony Ericsson handset, the Z500, is a telephone which will appear in the United States in the third quarter and work in the fast EDGE network -- a third generation technology using existing GSM network spectrum.
The third phone is the K700 which has an FM radio, camera and an MP3 player for digitally recorded music. It will come to the market in Europe in the second quarter.
Two other models are the T237 and T637, upgrades of existing color screen models with in-built or clip-on cameras, aimed at the U.S. market.
