Well, here’s a surprising headline that I don’t think anybody expected to see today: Samsung has decided to cut its mobile line of smartphones by 30% - meaning that out of 56 smartphone releases that Samsung typically has in a given year, the South Korean company has decided to narrow it down to about 39 or so in 2015. The decision to release less phones is likely the direct result of dropping profits by a whopping 49 percent.
But will 30% actually do much good for a company that releases so many smartphones in a given year? 30% seems like a big number in theory, but not when there are 56 smartphones to count. Even with 39 smartphone releases, Samsung will still be one of the top contenders for most smartphone releases in a year. According to an article by Ars Technica, comparitive figures from 2014 include: 2 handsets from Apple, 11 from Motorola, 27 from HTC, and 41 from LG. Comparitively speaking, Samsung is really just toning it down a couple of notches, but not really doing anything too drastic - especially when compared to Apple.
Still, one has to wonder how a 30% decrease will effect the rest of Samsung’s lineup. I’ll admit, I never fully realized just how dense Samsung’s end of the market was when it came to mobile. I knew they released a lot of smartphone variants, but I didn’t realize just how many. Looking at that list of recently released Samsung smartphones is somewhat mindblowing to me - there are so many Galaxy devices on the market. I only recognize about 13 of them. Granted, I realize that many are released in specific regions so it wouldn’t make sense for me to know about some of them, but either way it just seems like Samsung has really gone out of their way to make extremely specific devices.
This wouldn’t be the first time that a mobile manufacturer was suffering from the “too much of a good thing” syndrome. It wasn’t too long ago that HTC was finding out the same lesson. Just because you make a lot of things doesn’t necessarily mean they will all sell well. Naturally, when a company has too much product that isn’t profitable, the best thing to do is scale down. Not only do you cut out some monetary losses, but Samsung can also use this to possibly make their more popular products even better. Looking at HTC’s climb out of the grave they dug, we can tell that it’s not an impossible feat - and HTC was in way deeper graves than Samsung is in. Samsung is in more of a pothole than a grave. Still, you don’t want that to get too deep before it becomes really hard to dig yourself out.
Samsung has been on this kick of trying out a lot of different “unique” features in their smartphones, likely in an attempt to figure out what works and what doesn't. This was easy for them when profits were good and plenty, but now that their ship is starting to sink again, it’s probably time to just stick with what works and improve on that. I don’t think they should stop innovating by any means, but I do think that toning it down a bit is going to be a smart move on their part in one way or another. Even if they don’t come out with anything wowtacular after the 30% decrease, at the very least they’ll be saving a lot of money (which is always a good thing).
Image via Android Authority
