Asus seems to be following within the footsteps of LG by confirming it’s quitting the smartphone enterprise. The Taiwanese tech large is understood primarily for its Home windows PCs, together with its Republic of Players (ROG) gaming vary, however has additionally produced Android telephones for greater than a decade.
These included many telephones with the Zenfone branding through the years, culminating within the well-received, smaller type issue Zenfone 9 and Zenfone 10, launched in 2022 and 2023 respectively. Asus additionally persistently produced ROG branded gaming telephones, with the ROG Cellphone 9 collection debuting in 2024.
2025 noticed the launch of the Zenfone 12 Extremely, a super-sized telephone that wasn’t bought within the UK or US.
Now, in an interview with Taiwanese publication Inside, Asus’s chairman Jonny Shih mentioned the agency would cease making smartphones.
“Asus will not add new cell phone fashions sooner or later,” Shih reportedly mentioned in a media briefing (translated utilizing Google Translate). The article frames the announcement as an indefinite hiatus as Shih added he “will proceed to maintain the model’s cell phone customers,” which means the corporate intends to proceed to launch software program updates to latest fashions, although this was not particularly confirmed.
“Chairman Jonney Shih confirmed that Asus will quickly stop launching new cellphones and can absolutely shift its R&D sources to the fields of business PCs and “Bodily AI,” making a full-fledged push for the wave of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” Inside reported.
The report additionally said that Asus’s 2025 income grew 26.1 p.c yr over yr to NT$738.91 billion (£17.35 billion). Identical to LG determined to stop the telephone enterprise in 2021 to focus on different applied sciences, so Asus seems to have determined to do the identical.
Whereas the Zenfone model was by no means a bestseller within the UK, the road up has proved standard in Asia through the years, whereas the ROG Cellphone vary helped pioneer the thought of a specialist gaming telephone as an alternative choice to Apple, Samsung and the remainder.
The ROG Telephones had vapour cooling chambers, RGB lights and set off buttons, in addition to side-mounted USB-C ports for charging whereas gaming vertically. However many high-end telephones now have improved cooling and efficiency that may deal with the newest premium cellular video games, maybe making gaming telephones much less interesting to shoppers.
I used to be a giant fan of 2023’s Zenfone 10, which has a 5.9-inch display and a headphone jack, with a singular textured again. It was very pocketable and had nice battery life, too. However Asus solely promised two years of Android updates, leaving that three yr outdated telephone caught on Android 15. We’re already as much as Android 16 elsewhere.
With restricted sources in its telephone division to maintain telephones up to date in comparison with the market leaders, it appears as if Asus has seen the writing on the wall.
