Xperia Compact buyers seem to be the most loyal outside the Applesphere, but they are not frequent buyers and rarely willing to pay extra for the very latest increment. A difficult group to build a business on.
In the bigger picture, I think that Sony never really managed to emancipate itself from the network provider sales channel. According to hearsay, the whole "new models twice a year, and a premium variant on top" madness was entirely driven by Japanese network providers. A network driven product portfolio has never worked out well for a phone brand, because the resulting multitude of models makes no sense to off-channel buyers. Which includes every international buyer outside the market reach of the "home" networks of the network-driven models. Motorola used to suffer from this as well.
The XZ2 Compact suggests Sony doesn't have any idea what people liked about previous compact models. It's larger in every dimension than the models leading up to it, and significantly thicker. Despite that, it loses the headphone jack and barely gains any battery capacity.
What does it gain for all that? Screen resolution, mainly, going from 319 PPI to 483. I'd be hard pressed to care less about that change, as I'd need a VR headset or other magnification to notice.
iPhone release was quite late in Japan because SJ told Japanese providers where to stick their dumb demands, which ended up being a huge coup for SoftBank
In the bigger picture, I think that Sony never really managed to emancipate itself from the network provider sales channel. According to hearsay, the whole "new models twice a year, and a premium variant on top" madness was entirely driven by Japanese network providers. A network driven product portfolio has never worked out well for a phone brand, because the resulting multitude of models makes no sense to off-channel buyers. Which includes every international buyer outside the market reach of the "home" networks of the network-driven models. Motorola used to suffer from this as well.