Japanese electronics company Kyocera has announced it’s exiting the consumer smartphone space due to decreased demand for its products.
In the company’s most recent financial report, Kyocera says it ended development of new consumer smartphone products this March, and it will stop selling phones to the general public by March, 2025.
If you don’t live in Japan you could probably be forgiven for thinking Kyocera had already stopped making smartphones. It’s been years since they’ve been serious contenders in the global smartphone space.
But Kyocera phones are still seeing some success in Japan… it’s just that most of the company’s smartphone sales are to business customers rather than consumers. So the company plans to pull the plug on consumer smartphones and shift its focus to business customers and related categories like 5G networking infrastructure.
The move comes as Kyocera’s Communications Unit reported a 20.8% year-over-year decline in sales revenue.
Still, I suppose Kyocera can at least brag that it stuck it out in the competitive consumer smartphone market a little longer than South Korean rival LG.
via GSM Arena and Hayapon Log
I used to have a Kyocera back in the CDMA days. Before that I pretty much only knew them as a kitchen knife brand.
Made a practically indestructible flip phone which you could immerse in bleach to disinfect as well as drop on concrete without worry. Instead I bought a low tier budget smartphone for about the same price. I think the Kyocera would have been a much better long term phone investment.
Kyocera had a good product, but I think they sealed their fate when they failed to respond to the market by providing competitive mid-tier and flagship phones.