Surprise! Samsung Would Like People To Buy New Phones Every Year

It’s a pretty common feeling. You get a new smartphone and are thrilled with it. A year goes by, a new phone comes out and suddenly you’re left with a debate. Should you wait a year, or is it worth it to upgrade now?

Samsung is trying to make it easier for some of its customers to make that decision, officially launching an upgrade program that makes it easy to trade in your old Samsung smartphone when a new one comes along. The program appears to have launched in South Korea and in Britain. Users are asked to agree to pay a small additional monthly fee — the price seems to vary by market — for 24 months when they buy their phone. After 12 months, if their phone is in good condition, they can trade their old phone in for a new one. It’s timed to the launch of the new Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge.

Samsung hasn’t made any announcement about whether the option will come to the United States. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Apple already has a similar program for the iPhone. Many carriers also offer plans that let you upgrade your phone more frequently. But the benefit for smartphone makers to run these programs is clear: getting people signed up on their own upgrade plan gives them a better shot at a repeat consumer, and more often. If you’re paying for an annual upgrade plan, chances are pretty good that you won’t be waiting two years before buying your next phone.

That’s particularly appealing to companies such as Samsung right now. Because, overall, growth has slowed for the high-end smartphone market. Consumers, it seems, aren’t quite as excited as they used to be about yearly smartphone upgrades, which have tended toward the incremental rather than the revolutionary lately. Not only that, low-end smartphones are improving in overall quality, making them more appealing to those who don’t need to stay on the cutting edge of smartphone design.

Samsung has been hit particularly hard by cooling enthusiasm for smartphones. The company said in January during its quarterly earnings report that it expects smartphone sales to be slow throughout the year. While it reported a fairly strong holiday quarter for 2015, the company said that its net profits had fallen 40 percent from the previous year.

Samsung’s new phones, however, have gotten rave reviews for combining the strengths of its most recent phones — metal construction, an excellent camera — with some features it brought back from older phones, such as expandable memory and water-resistance. The phones will officially go on sale Friday.