When you can’t beat them, join them. Fun fact, despite the whole Galaxy S7 debacle which had Samsung recall the entire lineup, the South Korean giant still reported giant profits for Q4 2016. The reason? Their components division which has the likes of Apple and others buying chipsets, RAM, and flash memory by the truckload.

For Samsung, it’s a win-win. Compete with Apple in the phone space but also sell them to as well. Profits roll in either way. Now Sony is finding itself in a similar situation.

Katie Collins writing for Cnet about Samsung utilizing Sony batteries for the upcoming Galaxy S8:

 Seeking to ensure it doesn’t endure a repeat crisis in 2017 the company is looking to a variety of battery manufacturers to provide parts for the much-anticipated Galaxy S8.

The company is adding a familiar name to the current lineup of manufacturers providing batteries for this year’s flagship phone — namely Japanese tech giant Sony — the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Sony will be the third company to provide the lithium-ion batteries that will power Samsung’s Galaxy S8, WSJ said, citing people familiar with the matter. The order placed with Sony is reportedly proportionally smaller than those placed with the other two suppliers, Samsung SDI Co. and Amperex. 

It’s unclear why the order for Sony batteries is smaller, though perhaps it’s mainly due to their production capacity compared to the other partners. As Katie goes on to note, this certainly isn’t unprecedented for Sony who supplies Apple’s iPhone with its camera sensors.

As Sony continues to fall behind in the mobile market (and let’s be honest with ourselves, the only two true players are Apple and Samsung), they need to find other ways to compete and the semiconductor business is a highly lucrative one. It’s not as if global shipments of smartphones have dried up all of a sudden – in fact, it’s quite the opposite actually. It’s just that previous players like Sony, LG, HTC, Motorola, Nokia, and Blackberry no longer find themselves in a place to compete.

Fortunately for Sony, their competitors (Samsung aside) don’t have the same expertise they do when it comes to hardware design and are left to retreat to other consumer electronic categories. Sony on the other hand has the ability to manufacture components which ensures them a piece of the pie from the hundreds of millions of phones being sold each year.