Samsung is hoping to combat the massive slump in smartphone sales with cheap 5G handsets meant to make the next generation of wireless tech much more accessible to the masses.

While consumer 5G adoption was already expected to continue marching toward mainstream popularity in 2020, industry sources suggest the COVID-19 crisis accelerated those plans. That’s particularly true for Samsung seeing how the company was long overdue for an overhaul of its mid-range Android smartphones, as evidenced by its continuous decline in the world’s most competitive markets like India and China.

Samsung slashes consumer 5G entry price by 62% in 11 months

The ongoing pandemic situation continues to take a heavy toll on the mobile industry, with new reports indicating February sales were down 38% annually, amounting to only 60 million units worldwide. Samsung and other top manufacturers aren’t under any illusions that the worst is behind them, either. The fact that worldwide smartphone shipments experienced a mere 13.3% decline over the first quarter of 2020 underlines how global markets were in the business-as-usual mode until early March, as per the same source. With the majority of the planet now being on lockdown, Samsung’s second-quarter performance has nowhere to go but down – the only question is how low.

Cue the company’s 2020 Galaxy A portfolio meant to combat that emerging negative trend by making cutting-edge telecom tech much more affordable than the first generation of 5G smartphones released last year. The MSRPs for the newly announced Galaxy A51 5G and Galaxy A71 5G amount to $499.99 and $599.99, respectively. That’s a far cry from the $1299.99 price tag Samsung attached to its seminal 5G flagship released not even 11 months ago – the Galaxy S10 5G.

The industry giant already confirmed its 2020 Galaxy A series will be coming to the U.S. Ditto for the EU, UK, India, Australia, and most other major markets around the globe. While it remains to be seen whether offering much cheaper 5G smartphones slows down its mobile sales decline to a significant degree, particularly in fiercely contested markets, the silver lining for Samsung is that it already lost China years ago, thus remaining insulated from the economic crash the Far Eastern country went through in Q1 2020.