Thankfully a new report from Sammobile sheds some light on this decision, and why Samsung wasn’t that keen on a Fan Edition device this year. Like any other smartphone manufacturer, Samsung has been hit hard by the ongoing chip shortage. This has forced the company to rationalise their recent offerings and focus on more profitable products. The company is also grappling with a massive inventory build up across it’s entire product line, specially their entry level offerings. Samsung might be right to fear weak demand for a new FE smartphone when they already have the S21 FE which is still a solid offering. Instead the company is shifting focus to the Galaxy S22 Ultra, and increasing it’s production even at the cost of canning the S22 FE launch this year. The Galaxy S22 Ultra has surpassed Samsung’s sales expectations, and the company now hopes to ship over 11-million units this year. Now this doesn’t mean the FE line up is gone forever, as recent rumors suggest the company might release the phone next year. This makes way more sense from Samsung’s point of view, as the phone will probably will probably use the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 or the Exynos 2200 processor, but then it wouldn’t clash with the production of the newer flagships which would most likely use the latest SoCs.
