[Galaxy S 4 General] BarryH_GEG:
Interesting take on the whole importance of Asia thing. Pages of discussion and not a single fact. ;) If you look at smartphone sales in general you'll see huge numbers and growth from emerging markets. Same thing with smartphone penetration. But in this discussion we're not talking about "smartphones;" we're talking about "high-end smartphones." Samsung reported selling 60MM smartphones in Q4 2012. Of those, 15MM were SGS3-class or higher. If you want to understand what the top countries for

high-end

Android smartphones are all you need to do is look at where their number one competitor sells the most phones. Here's a sobering fact. Dumb phone sales were 60% of mobile devices sold in 2012. There may be a ton of high-end devices running around in Asia but the percentage of the population in a lot of countries that can afford one pulls total sales down. So seeing iPhones, Notes, SGS's and One's in the mall doesn't mean sales for that respective country are high. It's fascinating how many people think everyone can afford a high-end mobile device or feel owning one is a financial priority.

And here are the top mobile carriers by subscriber count. If a carrier for your country's not on the list or low on the list your country's not as big as you think it is. But, like stated above, having a ton of subscribers isn't the same thing as having a high percentage of high-end smartphone users.

As for Qualcomm vs. S-600 in the EU. Historically, Samsung's sold devices that required LTE with Qualcomm chips and used Exynos everywhere else. There are currently 89 carriers (out of hundreds) worldwide that support LTE. They wouldn't have spent billions in R&D to develop Octa if they didn't expect it to be widely used.

Here's exactly what Samsung said initially.

“Currently, the Galaxy S4 will be available at launch in the UK as a 4G device with a 1.9GHz Quad Core Processor.”​

They then retracted it and provided this.

“In the UK the Galaxy S 4 will be available as a 4G device with a 1.9GHz Quad Core Processor”​

There's a couple of ways of reading the first statement. "Currently" as used could mean either "for the time being" or "as we now know." "At launch" as used could mean the LTE-equipped SGS4, most likely via the carriers, could be the first rolling out. There's enough ambiguity in the first statement to leave room for a HSPA Octa device to be sold in the UK.

The second statement is pretty cut and dried with the door being left open for HSPA/Octa because the statement doesn't say "only" available which would mean no chance for HSPA/Octa. Since the UK government just took in billions from the carriers at its 4G spectrum auction, my guess is that the carriers pressured Samsung to either only deploy the SGS4 in the UK as an LTE device or delay the introduction of a HSPA version so the big wave of early purchasers would have devices that are capable of using the carrier's new LTE networks. If all the unlocked SGS4's sold in the UK are LTE-capable the likelihood of people paying the carriers more for LTE access is higher.

As for other markets, there's no reason to believe Exynos won't be Samsung's primary choice unless LTE's required the way it has been historically. In countries that formerly got Exynos that are now getting S-600 my guess is it has nothing to do with Samsung’s preference of chips and everything to do with carrier politics.