Stick a fork in Panasonic’s smartphone division; it’s done. In an unsurprising move, Panasonic has announced that it plans to stop developing consumer smartphones, but will continue making feature phones in its home country of Japan and may produce non-consumer smartphones if it feels the need.
This decision has long been a possibility for Panasonic, which stopped supplying smartphones to NTT Docomo, Japan’s largest mobile carrier and Panasonic’s only real smartphone marketing channel, in August. The company did this in reaction to a sharp sales decline from April to June that was a result of NTT Docomo shifting its marketing strategy away from Panasonic’s devices to those from Sony and Samsung.
Indeed, Panasonic posted an operating loss of around $55 million for its cellphone business over this period, making its decision to leave the smartphone market a pretty understandable one.
"It's not acceptable for the company to be bleeding red ink like this, so we have to think about ways to develop assets that we do have in a more effective direction," said Kazuhiro Tsuga, president of Panasonic, regarding the decision to give up on smartphones.
Tsuga went on to add that the company’s mobile division was looking at an $11 million targeted loss for the financial year ending this coming March
It’s a real shame, though, to see such a promising competitor leave the scene. Panasonic’s smartphones may not have sold well, but they generally boasted decent specs and high build quality, with the Panasonic Eluga being a good example of this. Unfortunately, even targeted efforts on the European market were unsuccessful for the company, where its SIP phone division continues to perform quite well.
Still, it’s not as though Panasonic smartphones will disappear altogether as the company is apparently looking at developing business-oriented devices that would be similar to its Toughbook notebook PC line.
Edited by
Alisen Downey 
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