Chinese customers reportedly sought refunds over glitches in Asustek Computer Inc’s (華碩) new smartphone, dealing a setback to the Taiwanese PC maker amid its expansion into China’s smartphone market.
Asustek executives have said that the firm considers China its primary smartphone market, to which it expects to ship 25 million devices this year.
Asustek’s latest ZenFone devices — powered by Intel Corp’s new Atom processor — are not compatible with the latest version of the Android operating system, version 5, known as Lollipop, leading nearly 200,000 Chinese consumers to demand refunds, the Chinese-language DigiTimes on Saturday reported.
Just “hundreds of ZenFone” handsets were returned in China — due to common apps being updated to run on Android 5.0 and an incompatibility with time division long-term evolution (TD-LTE) networks, a top Asustek executive said in response to the report.
“Asustek solved the technical issues last week and will resume shipping ZenFone devices to China,” an executive familiar with the issue and who declined to be named told the Taipei Times.
The technical issues and handset returns occurred only in the Chinese market, the executive added.
Asustek shipped 3 million handsets last quarter and said that it expects to ship 4 million this quarter, which is 1 million units short of its previous goal of 5 million handsets, apparently due to the technical issues.
At an investors’ conference this month, Asustek chief executive Jerry Shen (沈振來) said that the Chinese smartphone market would play a vital role for the company’s smartphone segment this year.
Shen said the company aims to ship at least 17 million smartphones this year, adding that if Asustek does well in China, it would not be difficult to boost annual shipments to 25 million smartphones by the end of this year.
Shen’s remarks reflect Asustek’s expressed ambition to sell 8 million smartphones in China this year.
The company said it plans to launch the ZenFone Zoom with an optical zoom function at the end of this quarter or at the beginning of next quarter.
In related news, Asustek had planned to offer users of its first-generation ZenFone handsets an upgrade to Android 5.0 by the middle of this month, but a verification issue has delayed the move.
The executive told the Taipei Times that — in an attempt to offer a better user experience — the firm plans to complete testing at the strictest standards before offering first-generation ZenFone series users an Android 5.0 upgrade.
“The delay of the upgrade will not affect Asus’ goal to clear all first-generation inventory by the end of next month,” the executive added.
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