Sony phones used to be sold via carrier, it was making huge losses that is what stopped Sony from selling via carrier. Sony phones are still sold via carriers in Japan and even in their home market they are behind Apple, Google and Sharp for total shipment.

There is a good reason why Sony stopped advertising their phones in US and stopped all carrier partnership it is due to low sales and huge loss from continuing their previous strategy. That cut was the reason why they were able to make some profit in 2020. You can read about it here.

You are saying stopping to cater the enthusiast market is the reason why Android is losing to iPhone for market share and they will lose more when iPhone comes with USB-C. If these enthusiasts where the key to marketshare why would they move to iPhone which is more restrictive? If USB-C is all it needs to sway enthusiasts, what is even the point with Android phones that support SD card and headphone jack? If you look at Samsung Smartphone divisions earnings and profit(from April 2023), it is actually up YoY even when global smartphone shipments have declined. Clearly it looks like they know what they are doing, they are making more profit even with less units being shipped.

What is your source for Sony Xperia line made profit? Are you basing it off from reading other tech blogs?

Well there is no exact way to know exact profit and loss for Smartphone division as they merged it with TV, Audio and Camera division. Only info they give for Smartphone division is their revenue and it is lower than TV, Audio and Camera division. In FY2020 results they mentioned they had a small profit for first time after FY2017, this is attributed to cutting expenses in Smartphone division(Source check FY2020 Financial Briefing). In FY2022 the revenue declined when compared to 2021 (https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/presen/er/pdf/22q4_sony.pdf page16). If you stitch together Smartphone division revenue from past 10 years it’s been on steady decline. Based on their earning call and analyst estimate Sony ships between 2-3 million units a year. Meanwhile Samsung shipped 260.9 million and Apple 226.4 million units last year. How can Sony Smartphone division be profitable when they are selling such low number of units, it’s hardly enough to amortize the development cost.

Interesting to see even with 24% YoY decline for smartphones, Android shipments fell 38% vs 6% for iPhone. Apple has completely gotten the hardware and software integration right to create whole better than the sum of its parts.

Even Android phones that have retained SD card and headphone jack(Sony Xperia 5 IV) are not doing any better. People in Android communities talk about retaining these features and they would only buy phones with these features. Yet when you check smartphone shipment data it is showing otherwise, phones that have removed these features are selling more.