Alliance Management

The Sony Ericsson company’s management style needs lots of improvement. The sales for the fourth quarter above show that the company has been affected by the worldwide depression. The loss generated for the first quarter of 2009 means that the people are no longer craving for expensive phones like the Sony Ericsson. The people have to feed their hungry stomach first before they think of dishing out lots of excess money to buy expensive mobile phones. A research should be done to determine what went wrong (Burwell,1999,19).

Alliance Performance

From the viewpoint of an outsider, the company is not doing well. It generated a lost for the first quarter 2009. The company generated a loss because it could not grab a material part of the customer pie of Nokia and other market segment. The company officers should have a brainstorming to determine their next course of action. This meeting must push through to revitalize its current marketing strategy because it seems to lose its effectiveness in increasing territorial segments. The strategy of the company should be to spy on the highly salable products of its top competitors like Nokia.

It must produce outputs that would outshine or outdo its competitors in the mobile phone industry and other jobs in the future. The future of the company is not as bleak. The world economy is expected to recover by the end of 2010. This clearly shows that the alliance may break apart if the total cost of production and expenses to operate are higher than the revenues generated from selling its mobile and other electronics –based products(Slavin,1989,595).

Why Sony and Ericson decided to ally?

Sony and Ericsson were struggling hard before their alliance in 2001. Both companies did not perform well financially on their own. The combined forces resulting to the installation of the Ericsson logo on Sony cell phones. This immediately increased the cell phones sales figures (Hisrich, 2000, 15). One of the initial marketing strategies of Sony Ericsson was to sell its camera phones in 2003. This T610 camera phone immediately sold like hotcakes when sold in the market. The T610 black and silver phones were immediate success stories. The company increases its mobile phone models to more than thirty -five in order to increase its sales figures (Gall, 2006, 293). The James Bond movie, Casino Royale, featured the Sony Ericsson mobile cyber shot phone unit. The success of these mobile phones was due to the many features it offered. The mobile phones included such features as MP3 players, and cameras. The company also increased its customer base by including Google Blogger facility on its Cyber shot phone which enables the mobile phone users to create their own blog and to post photographs on it in just two or three keystrokes (Henry, 2008, 2238).