Samsung’s plan to exit the feature phone market may be driven by the fact that the past few months have been nothing but abysmal for sales.
Samsung is one of the leading smartphone brands in India and it is equally popular in the feature phones market. But the South Korean giant may be planning to exit the low-value feature phone market — which sees the maximum shipments in India — by the year-end. The last batch of the devices will be manufactured by Samsung’s contract partner Dixon this December, post which the company is believed to focus on launching smartphones mostly above Rs 15,000. According to a report by Economic Times, Samsung is one of the two major multinational companies contributing to the Indian government’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme. This scheme allows manufacturers to seek sops from the government for local manufacturing but the condition is that the phones should be worth over Rs 15,000 factory price. With global inflation and shortage of components, the prices of smartphones have increased over the past few months, if not in recent years, and that could be the reason why Samsung is mulling focusing on the sub-Rs 20,000 or higher market.
