Despite the positive response of the Samsung Galaxy series of smartphones, the company itself has rather dismal projections of their smartphone sales for 2014. 

According to BGR, Samsung has lowered its projections from 360 million unit shipments down to 330 million, the second major reported cut for the South Korean company in the past two months. What was originally expected to be a year of at least 25% growth for Samsung's handset business has now been whittled down to just 14%. The report also says that this is an internal downgrade and that "the issue is not fixed yet," but it isn't unexpected -- Samsung is focused on finding new product categories that might help offset the inevitable slowdown in smartphone sales. 

According to The Business Insider, too -- which got its information from a translated version of a Korean Samsung press release -- Samsung expects smart phone sales to jump by 43% on a year-over-year basis this year. BI Intelligence estimates the overall smartphone market grows by 24%.

Samsung is lowering its forecast because it thinks the high-end of the market is getting saturated. Going after the low-end of the market isn't really an option. Constantinescu notes that the low-end is too low for even Samsung: $49 smartphones on the streets of China and India are worthless to Samsung, so it's not going to try to crack that market. Samsung wants to protect its profits by not competing too fiercely on price.

As a result of a big drop in the smart phone business, ET News says Samsung is looking for its next big growth market. In the short term, Samsung will focus on smart phone accessories like the Galaxy Gear smart watch.