Is Sony's camera (as opposed to sensor, now that the two are separated) business still highly strategic? Sony sold something like 231 million Exmor RS image sensors to a single customer for a single product line in (the customer's ) Fiscal 2015. The same product also uses a second, lower-end camera, which may also be a Sony sensor, although I can't find confirmation one way or the other. The same customer also makes several other products that probably use Sony sensors. The customer that may be buying as many as half a BILLION Sony sensors annually is, of course, Apple, and the product that sells in huge volume is the iPhone.
By comparison, Fuji kindly told us that they can make 160,000 X-Pro 2s annually - that is probably a ballpark figure for a lot of relatively expensive cameras, including several Sonys (if I had to guess, the A7II is somewhat higher - 250,000-300,000 annually, and the A7rII and A7sII are so expensive that they are each somewhat lower (maybe 100,000 each)). Total mirrorless sales, including everything from the Pentax Q and Nikon 1 up to the A7rII (but excluding two minor makers, Leica and Samsung, because they aren't Japanese and the data are compiled by a Japanese agency) are between three and four million cameras per year, and Sony may have as much as a 40% share of that volume. If both numbers are on the high end of estimates, Sony sells 1.5 million E-mount cameras annually, which makes me think my FE-mount numbers are high - 1/3 FE makes no sense, when they are as much more expensive as they are - everything non-FE is in the $500 range WITH A LENS, and is sold at Best Buy).
Maybe all of FE combined is something like twice that X-Pro 2 number? 300,000 FE-mount cameras (guesswork) out of a total of 1.5 million annual E-mount sales (high end of some relatively solid ranges) might work (please provide better numbers if you have them). Sony, of course, has a slow-selling A-mount line plus some high end compact cameras. Again, only Fuji is willing to provide any actual numbers, but X-100 series sales have been as high as 100,000 in their best year. The RX1 series, being three times as expensive, have to have been significantly lower (50,000 at most). Add in a small number of A99 bodies, and Sony's total full-frame sales are WELL below half a million per year. For total "real cameras", add in the 1.2 million APS-C E-mount bodies, and I'd be surprised if A-mount cameras plus RX 10 and 100 series compacts added another million. Sony might sell 3 million serious cameras annually, and they might sell another 10 million 1" and larger sensors to other people making serious cameras (all interchangeable lens cameras combined sell under 15 million annually, and some of those are Canons that don't use Sony sensors). Subtract the Canons and add in a bunch of !" and larger compacts, and Sony is selling somewhere between 5 and 10 million large sensors to other makers on top of between 2 and 3 million of their own serious cameras.
Is this a strategic business for Sony? The sensor business (mostly for phones and other embedded uses) certainly is - and they will keep making large sensors because the fabrication techniques are similar. Why not make a few million highly profitable large sensors if you can make them on the same equipment you use to make something that sells a billion units per year (between Apple and other makers)? Are the couple of million camera bodies worth it, when they are no longer overseen by the same people who do the sensors? Previously, they were a showcase for Sony's sensor wizards...