WhereIsAtlas · Technology

What Happened to Sony Ericsson?

Ericsson's phone business went into a joint venture with Sony in 2001, was sold to Sony outright in 2012, and was absorbed into Sony in 2021. Ericsson kept the networks.

Ericsson's handset business was merged into a 50-50 joint venture with Sony that began operating as Sony Ericsson on 1 October 2001. Sony agreed to buy Ericsson's half on 27 October 2011 and completed the purchase on 15 February 2012 for €1.05 billion, reported at about US$1.46 billion, renaming the business Sony Mobile Communications. The Sony Ericsson brand disappeared, Sony Mobile was folded into Sony Corporation on 1 April 2021, and Ericsson has had no handset business since 2012. Ericsson still operates as a mobile networks and software vendor, and completed the acquisition of Vonage on 21 July 2022.

The short answer

There are two questions inside this one, and they have different answers.

Where did Ericsson's phones go? Ericsson handed them to a joint venture in 2001 and sold its half of that venture to Sony in 2012. It has not made a mobile phone since [1][6][7].

Where did Sony Ericsson go? It was renamed. The brand ended in February 2012, when Sony took full ownership and called the business Sony Mobile Communications. Sony Mobile then disappeared as a corporate entity on 1 April 2021, when it was folded into Sony Corporation [1][5].

What is left is Sony's Xperia phone line, and Ericsson — a large telecoms equipment business that no longer sells handsets at all [1].

Ericsson before the phones

Ericsson is a nineteenth-century company. Lars Magnus Ericsson started a mechanical workshop in Stockholm in 1876, which became the business that carries his name, and the modern parent company, Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, was incorporated on 18 August 1918 as the outcome of a merger [2][3][4][12]. There is a small discrepancy in the record about that date: the company's own United States filing gives incorporation on 18 August 1918, while Swedish-language sources date the change of firm name to 19 August [12].

Mobile phones came a century later, and Ericsson was early. Its first handheld device, the Hotline Pocket, was introduced in 1987, and through the 1990s the company's handset division, Ericsson Mobile Communications, was one of the small group of firms that mattered in mobile telephony [1].

That decade ended badly for everyone who was not Nokia. Ericsson's handset business was losing money against a competitor with far greater scale, and the response in 2000 and 2001 was to find a partner rather than fight alone [1].

The joint venture

Sony and Ericsson combined their handset operations into a company owned equally by both, which began operating on 1 October 2001 as Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB [1].

The logic ran in both directions. Ericsson needed help recovering against its competitors in mobile phones; Sony, a consumer electronics giant with only a minor presence in cellular communication, got a way into a market it had struggled to enter on its own. Products and development drew on both parents: the company was based in London, with its design centre in Lund, Sweden, and research and development in Beijing, Tokyo and San Francisco [1].

The venture's first GSM phone was the Sony Ericsson T68i, released in 2001 [1]. What followed was the company's best period: the T610, the K800i sold under Sony's Cyber-shot camera brand, the W810 sold under the Walkman brand, and later the Xperia arc S [1].

At its peak in 2007 Sony Ericsson held about 9 per cent of the global mobile phone market and was the fourth-largest vendor in the world [1].

The company's platform history is a compact illustration of how the decade went. Sony Ericsson was the main user of UIQ, a Symbian-based smartphone platform, and abandoned it for Android entirely in 2010. From that point the Xperia sub-brand was the only handset family under the Sony name [1].

The sale

By the end of the 2000s the venture was losing money, squeezed between Apple at the top of the market and Samsung and the emerging Chinese manufacturers below.

On 27 October 2011 Sony announced that it would buy Ericsson's 50 per cent stake [6]. The acquisition completed in February 2012, with Sony paying €1.05 billion — reported at the time as US$1.46 billion — and the business was renamed Sony Mobile Communications, with its headquarters moved to Tokyo [1][5][7].

Two things are worth separating here.

First, this was not a collapse. Ericsson sold a half-share in a joint venture to its partner. The phones kept being made; they simply stopped carrying Ericsson's half of the name [7][8].

Second, this was the end of Ericsson's involvement in handsets. It had been a phone maker since the 1980s and a partner in the venture for eleven years, and after February 2012 it was neither. The coverage at the time said so directly: Ericsson was exiting the handset market [7][8][9].

What happened to Sony's phones afterwards

Sony kept making phones and kept losing ground. By 2017, Sony Mobile held less than 1 per cent of the global mobile phone market — but 4.8 per cent in Europe and 16.3 per cent in Japan, which is a reminder that a global share figure can hide a business that is still meaningful in specific markets [1].

On 1 April 2021 Sony Mobile was integrated into Sony Corporation. The subsidiary that had been created out of the Ericsson joint venture ceased to exist as a separate company, and the Xperia line continued under Sony itself [1].

So the brand went in three stages: Sony Ericsson until 2012, Sony Mobile until 2021, and then no separate company at all.

What Ericsson kept

Ericsson kept the business that has turned out to be the more durable one: mobile network infrastructure, and the software and services sold alongside it.

The company still operates as a networks vendor, and it has spent the years since the handset exit buying its way into adjacent markets. In September 2020 it announced the acquisition of Cradlepoint, a wireless networking specialist, in a deal reported at $1.1 billion [11]. On 21 July 2022 it completed the acquisition of Vonage, which became a wholly owned subsidiary — a purchase aimed at enterprise communications rather than consumer hardware [10].

That is the shape of the answer. Ericsson traded a consumer business it was losing for a network business it was winning, and the phones became somebody else's problem.

On the Ericsson name today

One question that comes up is whether the Ericsson brand has been licensed onto phones by other manufacturers since 2012.

No verifiable evidence for that could be found. Ericsson has continued to sell enterprise telephony equipment — including cordless and DECT business handsets — under its own name through its enterprise product line, but that is a business phone, not a consumer handset, and it is Ericsson's own product rather than a licence to a third party. The claim that the Ericsson brand has been licensed to outside phone makers is not made here, because it could not be substantiated [2].

Why this entry exists next to Motorola's and BlackBerry's

Three of the best-known names in 1990s and 2000s mobile ended in three different ways, and the differences are the interesting part.

BlackBerry lost the smartphone market and kept a company, converting itself into a security software business under the same name. Motorola split in two, so that its name now sits on a public-safety radio company and on a Chinese-owned phone brand at the same time. Ericsson did the cleanest thing of the three: it sold its handset business to its joint-venture partner, took the cash, and went back to what it was good at.

The Sony Ericsson brand is the part that people remember, and it is the part that no longer exists in any form. What survives of the phones is Sony's Xperia range. What survives of the company is Ericsson, which is a networks business — and, since 2021, no longer has a mobile phone division to argue about [1][10].

Entries in this story

Sources

  1. Sony Mobile — Wikipedia (2026-09-20) ↩
  2. Ericsson — Wikipedia (2026-09-20) ↩
  3. 1876 — Lars Magnus Ericsson starts a mechanical workshop — Ericsson (2026-09-20) ↩
  4. Ownership over the years — Ericsson (2026-09-20) ↩
  5. Sony Completes Full Acquisition of Sony Ericsson — Sony Corporation via Internet Archive (2026-09-20) ↩
  6. Sony buys Ericsson out of mobile phone venture — Reuters (2026-09-20) ↩
  7. Ericsson Exits Handset Market with Sale of Sony Ericsson Stake to Sony for USD1.46 Bil. — S&P Global Market Intelligence (2026-09-20) ↩
  8. Ericsson exits mobile handset JV Sony Ericsson — The Indian Express (2026-09-20) ↩
  9. Sony completes Ericsson buyout in handset venture — The Hindu BusinessLine (2026-09-20) ↩
  10. Ericsson completes acquisition of Vonage — Ericsson (2026-09-20) ↩
  11. Ericsson to buy networking specialist Cradlepoint in $1.1 bln 5G deal — Reuters (2026-09-20) ↩
  12. Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson Form 20-F — U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (2026-09-20) ↩