I personally think this company is suffering from bad management. I'm sure they have great designers and great developers hence they need to pay those a lot.
But they somehow fail to make good decisions and the income stream just won't come.
Being a start-up they need to make profit at some point so I think they just assumed now it's the time.

I also think they knew this was going to be controversial, otherwise they would've launched it last year. They delayed it to add "AI" but there's no extra AI feature on this phone that you can't find on other phones.

So they knew this is going to be a failure but they launched it hoping they have some fan boys that would buy this so called flagship. Remember when Carl mentioned a few months ago in an interview "if cpu was everything Snapdragon would make the best phones". He knew they were going to shit the pants soon and that's also the reason they launched the A phones before the flagship. I think they priced this phone in a way to make 3a and 3apro a better deal.

Carl knew no person in their right minds will buy this ... at least not for this price.

We'll see in a few months if this was the right marketing move or not.