Sony Ericsson selling cell phones like crazy

Following industry trends, Sony Ericsson also announces a huge quarter. The cell phone business is booming, and the number reported by Sony Ericsson echo the news already reported by Nokia and Motorola. Manufactures of communications devices are on a roll:

“Growth in the global handset market continued to outpace earlier expectations, and Sony Ericsson now forecasts the global market outlook for 2006 to be over 900 million units,” it said.

Its previous guidance was 10 percent market growth from an estimated 780 million units in 2005. The new outlook is close to Nokia’s recently updated 914 million units estimate.

Wow. That’s right: an expected 915 million handset units are expected to be sold in 2006! Even more impressive about the report is that no areas in the world are currently showing weakness. Even less developed emerging markets are showing rapid adaptation of cell phones, and pricing has remained relatively steady as more feature-rich products are introduced.

Sony Ericsson, in particular, is having great success leveraging the value of the “Walkman” brand by selling “music phones”. Another hot area for them, and of course the whole industry, is the camera phone, which was up sharply in sales as well. The trend looks to stay upwards for the forseeable future.