Asus expects to ship 30 million ZenFone units in 2015?

With shipments of the Asus ZenFone 2 off to a good start, Asus has hiked its internal forecast and now expects to ship 30 million ZenFone handsets in 2015. That is an increase of 5 million units from its initial forecast. Asus has two variants of the ZenFone 2, including one that carries 4GB of RAM. The ZenFone 2 was the first smartphone to be announced with that amount of Random Access Memory when it was unveiled at CES in January.

Launched in March, the ZenFone 2 will start shipping 2 million units a month in May, reaching 2.5 million to 3 million units in June. According to sources in the upstream supply chain, which is where all of this information has originated, Asus has been able to purchase components for the ZenFone 2 at cheaper prices as it increases production of the phone. The sources add that the company expects to ship 300,000 to 500,000 ZenWatch and VivoWatch smartwatches this year.

While the ZenFone 2 is driven by a 64-bit quad-core 2.3GHz Intel Atom Z3580 CPU, the upstream supply chain sources say that Asus will now be open to using Qualcomm's chips in future ZenFone models. While that business won't replace the orders lost from Samsung when the manufacturer turned to its own Exynos chips for the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Samsung Galaxy S6 edge, it will still be welcome news for the chipmaker. On Wednesday, we told you that Qualcomm had forecast lower Snapdragon sales in the second half of this year, in large part due to the loss of supplying Samsung with chips for its flagship phones.

source: DigiTimes