Kyocera made phones for 32 years — then conceded consumers didn't want them

Kyocera had been in the mobile phone business in Japan since 1991, and for a while it was genuinely ahead: in 1999 it released what it calls the world's first handheld wireless colour videophone. Its later identity was tougher products — rugged Android smartphones and flip phones built for construction sites and frontline work, the DuraForce line with its sapphire-shield display.

The consumer market, meanwhile, had consolidated around a handful of brands with a scale Kyocera could not match, and in May 2023 the company's president Hideo Tanimoto said what the numbers had been saying: the consumer smartphones lacked 'marketability'. The division had just posted a ¥2.27 billion ($16.6 million) loss. Kyocera announced it would stop selling phones to consumers entirely.

What remained was the niche that had always worked: rugged devices for business customers, sold to enterprises that outfit workers rather than to shoppers comparing specifications. It is the same retreat other Japanese makers made the same year, and the same admission — that design or durability is not a position in a consumer phone market where the platform owners set the terms. Kyocera kept the phones it could defend and gave up the ones it could not.