Asus is learning on the fly about the smartphone market. The Zenfone 2 brought an aggressive price point and the Zenfone 3 upped the price and increased the consumer resentment. People these days want to see cheap prices and there has been some disappointment from consumers who wanted a cheaper Zenfone 3 Deluxe.
In a recent Digitimes interview, Jerry Shen, Asus CEO talked about the sales objective for the Zenfone 4 and beyond. In the three years, Shen expects Asus to ship 35-40 million units. That’s their target.
In 2016 Asus shipped 20 million smartphones which was a 5% growth from the previous year.
The Zenfone 4 will be introduced in Q2 2017 which falls to the Computex 2017 show no doubt. From that show, hopefully Asus will get the phones to market faster than with the Zenfone 3 rollout. Additionally with a big goal, Asus may need to look at finding ways to bring down the price slightly. Certainly markets reacted unfavorably to the Zenfone 3 pricing even though the prices are still significantly cheaper than the top flagship phones.
[source: Digitimes]
