Samsung decides 56 smartphones a year is too many, will cut lineup by 30%

Samsung has been in a pretty tough spot lately. After several quarters of record profits in 2012 and 2013, the company has crashed back down to Earth. The low point for Samsung came last quarter, when it reported a 49 percent drop in profits. At the high end of the market, the company currently has to fight off Apple, which just released a phablet of its own. At the low end, it's going up against a flood of cheaper Chinese OEMs, led by Xiaomi and Huawei.

To try to get out of this slump, Samsung is taking a "less is more" approach. According to The Wall Street Journal, the company said it would cut its 2015 smartphone lineup by 25-30 percent. The company will work on the internals, too, saying during its last earnings call that it will "increase the number of components shared across mid- to low-end models, so that we can further leverage economies of scale."

The belt-tightening might seem like a big change for Samsung, but the company has so fully flooded the market with smartphone models that a 30 percent cut will barely put a dent in its lineup. And thanks to GSM Arena's phone database, we can get a pretty good estimate of just how big Samsung's product lineup is in order to compare it to the competition.

In 2014, Apple released two new smartphone models, Motorola released 11, and HTC came out with a pretty big lineup that saw 27 new phones released. These figures are all dwarfed by Samsung's output, though, which pumped out a whopping 56 new smartphones in 2014. The only company that comes close to Samsung is its Korean rival LG, which tried to keep pace with 41 smartphones.

That's not even counting existing devices that were introduced in 2013 but were still on sale in 2014, so the number of devices a customer has to choose from is actually much higher. If you go to Samsung's website and click on "All Cell Phones," you'll get a list of 171 products currently for sale. That's inflated by carrier variants and maybe even has one or two flip phones in it, but it's still a huge number.

2014 wasn't an especially busy year for Samsung, either. In three years, the company has created 190 smartphones, for an average of 63 smartphones per year. Apple introduced five smartphones total in the same time period. If Samsung actually goes through with the 30 percent lineup cut, it will still release 39 smartphones in 2015.

Samsung isn't expecting a quick turnaround from the move, saying it still believes profit margins will stay under 10 percent. However, the company traditionally has profit margins above 15 percent, which The Journal points out it maintained for 10 consecutive quarters until Q3 2014.

All things considered, tough times may still be ahead for the company. And Samsung didn't even mention tablets, a segment where the company introduced 27 new models in 2014 compared to Apple's two.