Dramatic cut in Samsung’s smartphone forecasts, blaming high-end saturation

Korean site ET News reports that Samsung has cut its smartphone sales target for 2014 from 360M handsets to 330M. The company’s original goal would have represented 25 percent year-on-year growth, now reduced to just 14 percent.

The company is blaming saturation at the top end of the market, with many existing owners of flagship handsets having reduced their upgrade cycle from annual to bi-annual.

Samsung as a whole isn’t hurting – it recently announced record revenues and profits – but the bulk of those earnings came from lower-end handsets and its chip manufacturing business. The ET News piece says that Samsung also plans to move into a whole bunch of new areas, including cloud computing and hi-tech materials … 

Samsung’s strength as a company is ultimately its diversity: there aren’t too many pies in which the company doesn’t have its corporate finger, from textiles to ship-building. All the same, to see it faltering in one of its highest-profile businesses is bound to be generating some worried looks in the board room.

Via Android Beat