WARNING: Samsung Says Galaxy Note 7 Can Burst Into Flames While You Use It, Issues Global Recall

Samsung has axed its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone, stopping production of the faulty device a day after it halted global sales of the product.

The South Korean company said in a regulatory filing Tuesday that it has made a final decision to stop production for the sake of consumer safety. ‘Taking our customer’s safety as our highest priority, we have decided to halt sales and production of the Galaxy Note 7,’ the company said.

A spokesperson for Samsung confirmed to MailOnline that the smartphone has been ‘permanently discontinued’.

Samsung was struggling to regain consumer trust after a first round of recalls. The company stopped selling the device after finding that even the supposedly safer replacements it was providing for recalled Note 7 phones were catching fire.

The company says consumers with original Note 7 devices or replacements they obtained after the recall should turn off the power and seek a refund or exchange them for different phones. The axing of the Note 7 will translate into lost sales of up to 19 million phones, or nearly $17 billion (£14 billion), according to analysts at Credit Suisse.

After the initial recall it was expected Samsung would lose $5 billion ($4 billion) in expected sales and recall costs based on the assumption that the firm would resume global Note 7 sales.

The Korean technology giant’s share price tumbled 7 per cent in trading in Seoul on Tuesday, wiping billions of dollars off its value. The announcement follows several new incidents of overheating last week and deals a further blow to the world’s largest smartphone company.

South Korean media reported Monday that Samsung’s factories stopped making the fire-prone phones but Samsung insisted it was making production adjustments to improve inspections and quality control.

Leading mobile network operators had already said they would stop distributing new Note 7 phones as replacements for the earlier recall.

The scale of the problem was first revealed when Samsung announced on September 2 a global recall of 2.5 million Note 7s in 10 markets, including the United States, due to faulty batteries causing some of the phones to catch fire. In the U.S. the handset costs $834-$880. source

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