Kyocera stops making phones for consumers

Today Kyocera has announced that it’s officially leaving the consumer mobile phone business, after a struggling period in which the company amassed a JPY 2.27 billion ($16.6 million) loss this February. In other news, it looks like Kyocera was still making phones – even though you, like us, may not have heard of any in the past few months (or years).

The company is only quitting the consumer space, by the way. It will continue to serve corporate customers. With deteriorating profitability, something had to be done and apparently axing the consumer products was it. “We can no longer find marketability for the general market”, Kyocera President Hideo Tanimoto said.

The company has found it hard to compete recently, even in the Japanese market, with Chinese makers like Xiaomi and Oppo, as well as other Japanese brands like Sharp and Sony.

This is sad news for those who’ve been around the mobile block for a while now, since Kyocera was one of the oldest companies involved in the space, having been manufacturing mobile phones since 1989.

Source (in Japanese)