Sony spins off chipmaking business

Sony has announced that its semiconductor unit will now be separated from the company’s core business. The strategic decision arrived in order to allow the Japanese electronic firm to focus its resources and attentions on the Devices and the Digital image divisions. This last one in particular, in fact, has been stated to provide sensors for use in iPhone cameras.

The new spin off company, called Sony Semiconductor Solutions, will kick off and start running from next April 2016 and it will be mostly focus on the product development of image sensors. In this way, the Devices division that has been holding inside the image sensor business, battery and storage media arms all together, will be now eventually split in a different way.

Indeed, the battery business will belong to the Sony Energy Devices Corporation, while the storage media division will become part of the Sony Storage Media and Devices Corporation. The Device division, which represents one of the leading and fast growing units for the Japanese company,  will now focus on image sensors production. As a matter of fact, Sony found a great return on this niche that  has been generating an operating income of $249 millions in just 3 months. A great result that would help to balance the hard efforts made to keep it up with the smartphone business.

Referring to the upcoming changes, Kazuo Hirai, CEO of the company, stated that this spin off decision was taken in the aim of improving Sony’s internal processes, making the Japanese firm more profitable and responsible.