Sony makes exclusive Xperia 1 II for Taiwan, but does it make sense?
Offers more RAM and new Mirror Lake Green color
There are many things about Sony Mobile that baffle me, and their relationship with Taiwan is one of them. As a whole, Sony doesn’t sell a lot of smartphones, and while they don’t break down their sales figures by country or even territory, we know their yearly sales totals, and it’s not pretty.
It’s worth pointing out that 2020 is far from finished, but the above chart gives you a pretty good indication of what their numbers will be for the year. Therefore, when global sales are this depressed, they’re low in individual countries as well. Now, it can be argued that Sony has a more substantial presence in Asia than it does in North America. While true, when you’re only selling around 3 million phones, it’s just not that many, even if they’re primarily being sold in one region.
This brings us to Xperia 1 II and Taiwan. Sony has an all-new variant for the country that bumps up the phones RAM from 8GB to 12GB in a new, sleek Mirror Lake Green color. While more RAM is always welcomed and is important in Asia, a culture that still heavily makes their buying decision based on tech specs, I’m not sure selling such a phone makes sense.
Low Xperia sales already result in increased costs for each handset produced. As taught in Economics 101, the larger a component order, the lower the price, and conversely, the smaller the component order, the higher the price. In this case, for Sony to further fragment their manufacturing means that the manufacturing cost on what’s already expensive devices will only be higher when they don’t have scale on their end. It’s also worth noting that the roughly 3 million phones Sony will sell in 2020 is across their entire lineup and not just Xperia 1 II, which brings us to their Taiwan exclusive devices.
If the entire Xperia 1 II lineup was receiving a boost in RAM and new color, you could make the case that it’s part of a global refresh. But when it’s exclusive to Taiwan, beyond all the logistics involved in shipping and marketing the phone, Sony must also tweak their component purchases and manufacturing.
I assume Sony could always sell these phones at a higher price, but therein lies a bigger question — is this entire endeavor worth the time and energy? And maybe even more importantly, how will other Xperia 1 II owners feel that the flagship phone that they’ve spent over $1,000 on isn’t the best because Sony makes that variant exclusive to Taiwan?
Let me know if you think making exclusives phones makes sense or, at the small scale that Sony operates on, that it’s a waste of their time and resources?
Update:
Sony is also bringing a 12GB model to Japan, something that I apparently wrote in August and clearly completely forgot about, but Mirror Lake Green will remain exclusive to Taiwan. My point remains unchanged — splintering your manufacturing for two countries makes little sense when your total shipments are so low.
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