Hiroki Totoki, the CEO and President of Sony Mobile, has given the strongest indication yet that Sony will never leave the smartphone market.

The rumours were started in February by Apple’s favour news agency Reuters and it quoted Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai saying he would not "rule out considering an exit strategy" for the smartphone and struggling TV divisions.

At the time it made sense.  Sony was losing a lot of money in its smartphone department and Reuters was taken a little more seriously when it reported on Jobs’ Mob rivals.

However now Totoki is stating in no uncertain terms that Sony "will never ever sell or exit from the current mobile business".

In an interview with ArabianBusiness.com, Totoki explained why Sony would never ditch mobile: "Smartphones are completely connected to other devices, also connected to people's lives - deeply... We're heading to the IoT [Internet of Things] era and have to produce a number of new categories of products in this world, otherwise we could lose out on a very important business domain".