China Times (www.chinatimes.net.cn) reporter Niu Xiaoou Yu Jianping Beijing report
Sony joins hands with Honda to build cars and has a clearer development plan and progress. Recently, Sony Honda Mobility, a joint venture between Sony and Honda Motor, was officially announced.
Sony Honda Mobility CEO O Mizuno Yasuhide said that it will deliver electric vehicle to the US market in spring 2026, and deliver to the Japanese market in the second half of 2026. Next, it will consider entering the European market. The joint venture will start sales in 2025. In addition, the company will produce electric vehicles at Honda's North American factory and mainly purchase raw materials in North America. This move also means that as more and more non-traditional car companies such as technology companies enter the automobile industry, the original division of labor system and industrial structure of automobiles will be impacted, and competition in the automobile market will become increasingly fierce.
Sony Want to seek a new business growth point
Sony and Honda announced that they will officially sign an agreement in June this year to establish a joint venture Sony Honda Mobility with a registered capital of 10 billion yen, each of which will hold 50% of the shares, and will sell electric vehicles and provide mobile services.
From the perspective of financial performance, Sony's current development is somewhat weak, and seeking new business growth points may be one of the reasons why Sony enters the car manufacturing field. According to Sony's first quarter financial report for fiscal year 2022. According to the financial report, Sony's first-quarter revenue was 231.15 billion yen (about 117.1 billion yuan), and its profit was 307 billion yen (about 15.35 billion yuan), and increased by 49.6% year-on-year. Although Sony's global sales of PS5 reached 2.4 million units in the quarter, an increase of 100,000 units from 2.3 million in the same period last fiscal year, the sales of PS4 gaming consoles were not announced in the financial report. This is also the first time that Sony canceled the PS4 sales in its quarterly financial report, which means that the life cycle of this generation of gaming consoles is about to come to an end. At the same time, Sony admitted that the sales of PS5 did not meet expectations, mainly due to the serious insufficient production capacity. Sony also said the company lowered its annual operating profit forecast by 4% to 1.11 trillion yen (about 55.5 billion yuan).
Today's automotive products are being fully digitalized, and every component and every function are being defined by software. The barriers to car manufacturing have evolved from the ability to combine and integrate tens of thousands of parts into the ability to combine and run hundreds of millions of lines of code. Against this background, technology giants have gradually become a trend for their layout of the "car manufacturing" industry. As one of the world's largest electronic product manufacturers, Sony's main businesses include games and network services, music, movies, SIPS (image-related), CMOS processors and semiconductors. This also provides a certain foundation for its impact on the intelligent car manufacturing track. Public data from
shows that as of now, Sony accounts for nearly half of the global CMOS image sensor (CIS) market, and image processing chips and semiconductors are essential hardware for smart electric vehicles. Since 2014, Sony has begun to deepen its automotive CIS market and invested a lot of money. In August 2020, Sony released the high-precision global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver chip; in November 2021, Sony launched its first automotive high-performance sensor - LiDAR , etc. It is also based on the fact that Sony aims at the car manufacturing track.
As early as 2020, Sony released the VISION-S series prototype car and unveiled its first sedan, VISION-S 01. In December of the same year, this car began public road tests in Europe; at the CES exhibition in January this year, Sony unveiled a new concept SUV VISION-S 02, and announced the establishment of Sony Mobile Travel Company to be responsible for its automotive business, which also means that Sony officially entered the automotive industry.
Sony and Honda said the new electric car will be sold at a high price, using new software systems developed by Sony, including on-board controllers, cloud services connected to entertainment and payment systems, which will open the way for them to earn recurring revenue from entertainment and other monthly services; Sony will provide sensors and other technologies to enable vehicles to have L3 autonomous driving systems, allowing drivers to pay more attention to the content and software services provided by the vehicle.The L3 autonomous driving system allows drivers to not have to control the steering wheel on specific roads, but they need to be ready to take over the vehicle's control at any time.
Automotive Industry analyst Wang Kun told the reporter of " China Times ": "The development of intelligent cars has entered a period of acceleration, and the time cost is much shorter than the development of traditional car manufacturers; and from a technical perspective, the basis of automobile intelligence is electrification. Compared with the complex process and numerous parts of traditional fuel vehicle manufacturing, electric cars rely more on software control, and relatively more complicated and simpler, and theoretically easier. This is also a technological strength such as Huawei and small One of the reasons why giants in consumer electronics and communications such as Mi and Sony have flocked to this track. "
has joined hands to build cars and become the "optimal solution"
Although there are no clear details about the upcoming new electric car, including pricing, battery range, and platform used, etc., it is certain that Sony's purpose is to open up a new track to expand new businesses. On the other hand, Honda, which has always been conservative, wants to take advantage of the joint venture to advance the process of change. Taishui Mizuno admitted that as cars gradually transform into intelligent connected devices, the project is very important for Honda to develop a "long-term relationship" with consumers.
Now the entire automobile industry is "concentrating its firepower" to deploy the new energy vehicle track, and many players are also relying on the new energy track to develop intelligent routes, including major traditional car companies, new car manufacturing forces, and cross-border companies in the fields of the Internet, real estate, technology, home appliances, etc. But Honda's development is slightly weak and slow.
Take the Chinese market as an example. As of now, Honda only launched one pure electric model, Honda e:N ( Dongfeng Honda model is e:NS1, GAC Honda model is e:NP1). Dongfeng Honda e:NS1 was launched in April this year. As of May, the cumulative sales of e:NS1 was 797 vehicles. At the moment when new energy vehicles are making rapid progress, the monthly sales volume is less than 1,000 vehicles; while GAC Honda e:NP1 was just launched on June 20.
"Huaxia Times" reporter learned from Honda China: "The new company aims to combine the mobile product research and development capabilities, body manufacturing technology and after-sales service management experience of Honda ( Honda Technology Research Industry Co., Ltd. ) advanced environmental protection and security technology, as well as Sony's development and operation results in image sensing, communication, networking and various entertainment technologies, and strive to achieve a new that is closely integrated with users and application scenarios and constantly evolves. First-generation mobile travel products and related services. "
Wang Kun believes: "The two parties in this cooperation will each give full play to their own advantages. Sony will be responsible for developing entertainment, network and other mobile service functions, while Honda will focus on production and sales. "
It is not difficult to find that in the context of each party having their own advantages and having a goal, Honda, which has a mature car manufacturing system and Sony, which has technological strength, chose to work together to build cars and become the "optimal solution."
Bai Yiyang, research department manager of China Merchants Bank International Securities Co., Ltd., analyzed to the reporter of the China Times: "Sony's logic of car manufacturing , Apple should be similar to Apple, and it is to enter smart cars from the consumer electronics field. The background is the intelligent trend of traditional cars, similar to the transformation of the mobile phone industry from feature phones to smart phones in the past. Under the influence of the new four modernizations, future automobile manufacturing cannot be separated from smart applications, and companies with advantages in smart software will also transform to lock in the car manufacturing field. However, car manufacturing is not only a software system construction, but also requires experience in manufacturing the whole vehicle and continuous investment ability. Therefore, Sony chose to join hands with Honda to enter the production track. This model is a good choice for both parties, and it is very likely to achieve a win-win goal."
