Samsung Electronics will scale down its mobile messaging application business including the ChatOn app, as it has failed to offer the expected profits, company officials said Monday. "Samsung Electronics plans to exit from the mobile messaging market from region-to-region as part of corporate strategy to restructure unprofitable businesses and improve profitability," a Samsung official told the Korea Times.

Samsung introduced the ChatON communication service in Sept. 2011.
Currently, the service is being used in more than 120 countries in 63 different languages. But it seems that Samsung faced strong competition from mobile messaging giants.

"Samsung is on track to streamline its business units. From a business point of view, ChatOn isn't a business that can show improvement in the future," said another official.

Samsung officials say its ChatOn service will be updated for service users in some markets before being pulled down completely.

According to a Bloomberg report, Samsung is also ready to replace the leaders of its mobile-phone unit. Previously, the company had announced plans to cut the number of new smartphone models by a third next year.

The company’s smartphone market share dropped to 24.7 percent in the third quarter, compared with 35 percent a year earlier, according to Strategy Analytics. Apple Inc. ranked second with 12.3 percent while Xiaomi’s share more than doubled to 5.6 percent.