Sony Ericsson posts Q3 profit

Mobile phone manufacturer Sony Ericsson reported a third quarter running of net profits on Friday following dramatic restructuring after a bad patch last year.
But its sales for the quarter fell far below expectations.
The Japanese-Swedish group, the fifth-biggest player in the global sector, said that in the three months ending in September, it had made a net profit of 49 million euros (69 million dollars), compared to 193 million in the red in the same quarter last year.
The company's sales however slipped by 1.0 percent to 1.60 billion euros, it said in its earnings statement.
The outcome fell far short of the figures expected by analysts who in a poll by Dow Jones Newswires had forecast a net profit of 67 million euros on sales up 13 percent at 1.87 billion.
Sales and the net outcome had plunged in 2009. Last year the company launched a programme to reduce costs involving an extra loss of jobs amounting to nearly 2,000 cuts.
The difficulty for Sony Ericsson, as for Nokia in neighbouring Finland, has been sudden steep competition from Canadian RiM (Blackberry) and especially from American Apple (iPhone), forcing the company to refocus its business on the high end of the handset market.