Samsung charts out new strategy to take on Xiaomi, Huawei

Seoul: Samsung’s plan to outsource a fifth of its smartphone production to China next year may help it compete with low-cost rivals such as Huawei and Xiaomi but it’s a strategy fraught with risks, people with familiar with the move said.

Samsung Electronics, which shut its last in-house Chinese smartphone factory in October, is quietly moving production of some Galaxy A models to contractors such as Wingtech, which are little known outside China.

Samsung has been coy about the volumes involved but sources said the South Korean tech giant plans to ship some 60 million phones made in China by so-called original design manufacturers (ODMs) next year out of a total of about 300 million devices.