In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Sony Ericsson President and CEO Bert Nordberg made a number of interesting statements about the iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and Motorola.
Defending the decision to pick Android as the choice operating system for its mobile handsets, Nordberg posits that it was ‘the best choice they could have made’ considering its rapid growth, but also acknowledges that the company “should have taken the iPhone more seriously when it arrived in 2007”.
Asked whether he would have liked to buy Motorola Mobility rather than Google, he candidly responds:
“Well sure, but before you go shopping you have to become rich.
And a deal between us would have been extremely complicated, with us being a private company with two large owners and them being a listed U.S. company.”
Nordberg says the goal is for Sony Ericsson to gradually shed its feature phone business and become a 100% smartphone company – much unlike Nokia, I should note. He estimates that to happen in the middle of next year (70% of its sales already stem from smartphones today).
Asked why Sony Ericsson hasn’t become the world’s largest maker of Android devices yet, Nordberg tells the WSJ that they’ve underestimated the speed with which it could penetrate the United States, where he acknowledges the company to be a “very tiny player”.
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Sony Ericsson has an estimated 11 percent share of the total Android market.
Asked whether the company would consider switching to Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, Nordberg says (emphasis ours):
“At this point I wouldn’t feel comfortable investing in a platform that isn’t as good as the one that we currently use. Therefore we have remained with Android, but I am quite curious about Windows Phone.”
