My guess is that this may be an attempt by Samsung to crack down on grey market imports of their devices.
Why would they want to do this? I could understand it in the case of a low-priced device intended for poor regions of the world, but this is a high-end phone that is presumably a similar (high) price everywhere it's sold.
Not really. I can either buy phone from local distribution or pay 10-20% less and get an imported one (wouldn't be surprised if it were from richer region, such as NA). That is the shop is still making money after they moved it half a globe and paid import taxes on it.
Because of that local distributors make much less money - they have to price lower and they don't sell as much. And probably forced this onto Samsung, which couldn't care less I guess since they still sold the phone in the end.
It seems to me that Samsung should care because there's a significant correlation between people who engage in regular intercontinental travel and people who buy expensive smartphones.
Why would they want to do this? I could understand it in the case of a low-priced device intended for poor regions of the world, but this is a high-end phone that is presumably a similar (high) price everywhere it's sold.