Samsung who have already scaled back overall sales of their smartphones has now moved to drastically cut production of their mod tier models as they come under pressure from falling sales and competition from the likes of Motorola who have dramatically increased sales during the past year.

Reports out of South Korea claim that Samsung has already cut back production of the 5G Galaxy A23 by as much as 70%.

The Company who are set to release a new range of Galaxy S23 smartphones in February originally planned to ship 12.6 million units of their budget smartphones, but this has been dropped to below 4 million units.

Samsung management had hoped 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 with the A23 5G in the second half.

According to observers the move to scale back production was taken after serious problems were identified in the design of the A23’s camera rig.

After a month-long investigation into the problem and after various discussions with component suppliers Samsung chose to scale back production with the Company set to only manufacture five million units worldwide.

ChannelNews understand that Samsung is still using Sunny Optical to supply a 50MP wide-angle main camera that comes with optical image stabilisation.

Sources said the issue Samsung faced with Galaxy A23 5G was not Sunny Optical’ s fault with the problem caused by components that interfaced and connected with the Sunny Optical camera module.

Samsung warned the Chinese company that they should have reacted sooner when the problem was first identified.