Samsung to stop producing feature phones

Most smartphone manufacturers once produced push-button phones; just a few years ago they

could be found in the assortment of Huawei and ZTE.But you can’t make much money from them, and large companies are less and less interested in their production. Today the last major bastion has fallen: as the India Times reports, the Korean company Samsung will curtail the production of push-button phones for the Indian market by the end of the year, the last batch will be released in December. In other countries, Samsung abandoned dialers even earlier, so this decision marks Samsung's final exit from the feature phone market.



Samsung B350E - Samsung's latest feature phone

This decision was not taken at all because of the difficultmarket situation: Samsung is the third largest feature phone market in India, behind only itel and Lava. It's not about high costs - all production is carried out by the local company Dixon, and the assortment consists of models announced back in 2012-2015 (the company has not introduced a single new model over the past seven years!). The company is simply not interested in supporting this direction: in pieces it makes up 20% of all sales of mobile devices, but in money it is only 1%. Samsung's main focus in India will now be on phones above Rs 15,000.

    © Ilya Nerybov.

    According to India Times