Asus appears to be following in the footsteps of LG by confirming it is quitting the smartphone business. The Taiwanese tech giant is known primarily for its Windows PCs, including its Republic of Gamers (ROG) gaming range, but has also produced Android phones for more than a decade.

These included many phones with the Zenfone branding over the years, culminating in the well-received, smaller form factor Zenfone 9 and Zenfone 10, released in 2022 and 2023 respectively. Asus also consistently produced ROG branded gaming phones, with the ROG Phone 9 series debuting in 2024.

2025 saw the launch of the Zenfone 12 Ultra, a super-sized phone that wasn’t sold in the UK or US.

Now, in an interview with Taiwanese publication Inside, Asus’s chairman Jonny Shih said the firm would stop making smartphones.

“Asus will no longer add new mobile phone models in the future,” Shih reportedly said in a media briefing (translated using Google Translate). The article frames the announcement as an indefinite hiatus as Shih added he “will continue to take care of the brand’s mobile phone users,” which implies the company intends to continue to release software updates to recent models, though this was not specifically confirmed.

“Chairman Jonney Shih confirmed that Asus will temporarily cease launching new mobile phones and will fully shift its R&D resources to the fields of commercial PCs and “Physical AI,” making a full-fledged push for the wave of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” Inside reported.

The report also stated that Asus’s 2025 revenue grew 26.1 percent year over year to NT$738.91 billion (£17.35 billion). Just like LG decided to quit the phone business in 2021 to concentrate on other technologies, so Asus appears to have decided to do the same.

While the Zenfone brand was never a bestseller in the UK, the line up has proved popular in Asia over the years, while the ROG Phone range helped pioneer the idea of a specialist gaming phone as an alternative to Apple, Samsung and the rest.

The ROG Phones had vapour cooling chambers, RGB lights and trigger buttons, as well as side-mounted USB-C ports for charging while gaming vertically. But many high-end phones now have improved cooling and performance that can handle the latest premium mobile games, perhaps making gaming phones less appealing to consumers.

I was a big fan of 2023’s Zenfone 10, which has a 5.9-inch screen and a headphone jack, with a unique textured back. It was very pocketable and had great battery life, too. But Asus only promised two years of Android updates, leaving that three year old phone stuck on Android 15. We are already up to Android 16 elsewhere.

With limited resources in its phone division to keep phones updated compared to the market leaders, it seems as though Asus has seen the writing on the wall.