You read right. Sony’s Walkmen are selling more units than Apple’s all-powerful, all conquering iPod. In the week ending August 31st, Sony’s share of portable music player sales hit 43%. The iPod struggled at a terrible 42.1%. Is Sony’s W-series Walkman bringing back Sony’s glory days of the 1980s?
The answer is, predictably, no. It also shows that the financial sector’s obsession with market share is flawed at best. The figures, reported by Bloomberg, give figures for market share in terms of units sold, not in terms of revenue or profits. Here are the prices quoted: Sony’s players all come in at under ¥1000 ($108), whereas Apple’s range from ¥8,800 ($95) to ¥47,800 ($516). Clearly, then, Sony is outdoing Apple at the bottom of the market, but has nothing to rival the top-end (cough netbook cough).
Further, these figures completely exclude the iPhone because it is a “wireless handset” (unlike the iPod Touch, which, wait…). Apple itself has reported dropping sales for the iPod as the iPhone and iPod Touch sell more and more. In fact, sales of vanilla music players fell 13.5% last year in Japan. So the takeaway from this seems to be that Sony has gained victory by challenging a weakened, diminishing enemy and beating it. Well done.
Does this remind you of anything? Barely six weeks ago, Apple was found to sell a huge 91% of computers over $1000.
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