Earlier today, we reported on Sony placing in the top 5 newly activated mobile devices during the holiday season. Though Sony has revealed no breakdown, the following information makes it pretty clear that Sony is nearly selling all smartphones with tablets only making up a very small percentage of their mobile division sales.

When speaking during a roundtable event in Japan, Hiroki Totoki, the new Sony Mobile CEO, revealed that Sony Xperia Tablets accounted for 5% of the divisions sales in 2013. During that year, Sony’s fleet only included the Xperia Z2 Tablet which offers a waterproof design. Just this June, Sony was able to partner with Verizon and bring their tablet to the US with carrier support. In that time span, competitors like Apple have brought out two different iterations of their tablets at varying form factors.

Come 2014, Sony finally entered the growing smaller form factor tablet market with the 8-inch Sony Xperia Z3 Tablet Compact. Despite having two different tablets, Totoki doesn’t see any growth for the company in 2014 or 2015. Details after the jump.

According to Totoki, while the company has grown their tablet offering to two, he expects that tablet sales for the company will dwindle in the years to come. In fact, he believes that by 2016, tablets will only account for 3-4% of Sony Mobile’s sales – which is a bit alarming.

For better or worse, Totoki seemed adamant that Sony would not withdraw from the tablet market but also offered no thoughts on how the company plans to move forward with their tablet vision. With such low sales, it’s worth asking why they’re even bothering to offer tablets instead of diverting all resources to smartphones.

Discuss:

If tablets sales to shrink down to 3-4% of Sony Mobiles total sales, should Sony continue to offer them or should they drop the product range?

[Via Watch Impress (JP)]