Samsung has drastically reduced its shipment target for its mid-tier smartphone Galaxy A23 5G this year, TheElec has learned.
The Korean electronics maker originally planned to ship 12.6 million units but this has been dropped to below 4 million units __ a 70% drop.
Earlier this year, Samsung had set a goal to ship 17.1 million units of Galaxy A23 4G and 12.6 million units of Galaxy A23 5G.
Their combined shipment would have been 30 million units, equivalent to around 10% of Samsung’s total annual shipment.
The 4G version was launched earlier in the year. Galaxy A23 5G later during the second half of the year.
A certain feature that was supposed to be on the phone caused serious problems with the handset’s operation.
Samsung talked with various partners to resolve the problem. The tech giant also conducted a month-long investigation into the problem to find out the issue.
While the problem was solved, the company is planning to manufacture fewer units of the Galaxy A23 5G due to the headaches it caused.
Samsung will also be only aiming to ship around 5 million units of the model in 2023.
The biggest change in developing Galaxy A23 5G for Samsung was that it changed its preferred partners in development.
Sunny Optical was chosen as the developer of the 50MP wide-angle main camera that comes with optical image stabilization. For Galaxy A23 4G, Partron took up the same work.
Sources said the issue Samsung faced with Galaxy A23 5G was not Sunny Optical’s fault.
The problem the model faced caused other components of the phone such as the camera to perform poorly, so the unspecified problem was the root cause, they said.
However, Samsung did tell Sunny Optical during their investigation that the Chinese company should have reacted sooner.