Samsung Denies Galaxy S8 Sales Are Slow

July 24, 2017
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According to Samsung’s Mobile Communications Division head Dongiin Koh, the cumulative sales of the Galaxy S8 smartphone are 15% ahead of their predecessors compared to the same number of days, refuting claims that the S8 was not selling as well as the S7, which was released last year.  Koh added that he expected the sales momentum to continue into the 3rd and 4th quarters of this year at a press conference in Taiwan, and when asked about the aggressiveness of Chinese smartphone manufacturers, he indicated that Samsung has been watching them closely, but has its own roadmap for smartphones that extends to 2020.
 
According to IDC, Samsung Electronics still holds the number one position in Smartphone shipments in 1Q 2017 although they saw no y/y growth, while the three Chinese brands that round out the top 5, after Apple’s  #2 position, each saw growth over 20%.   Samsung’s 79.2m units shipped are still greater than the total units shipped by the top three Chinese smartphone brands (77.9 combined), although only by 1.6%, while Samsung had a 26.9% shipment lead over the combined Chinese top 3 brands last year.  An old Chinese proverb says, “It’s not the fleas of a dog that makes the cat meow”
 
Table 1: Worldwide Top 5 Smartphone Vendors 

Source: IDC
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Despite Samsung losing ground in smartphone sales in China, its high-end models are being favored by unscrupulous handset makers who sell through unauthorized channels, according to Antutu, a mobile security app firm in China that said 43.6 percent of counterfeited phones in China were disguised as Samsung phones, with Galaxy S7 Edge, Samsung W2017, and Samsung W2016 being the copied most in the market. Antutu scanned 6.96 million handsets in the first six months of this year, among which knockoff models accounted for 2.96 percent -- slightly lower than the same period last year, said the report. Samsung's W series are dual-screen clamshell models specially targeting business groups in China, priced over $1,000 per unit. IPhone knockoffs accounted for 10 percent of the total counterfeited products, while fake Xiaomi, Oppo, and Huawei phones were 7.8 percent, 6 percent, and 5.5 percent, respectively. The Antutu report also mentioned that most of iPhone knockoffs were in fact running Android systems. Samsung's smartphone sales in China slumped by 51.2 percent to 4.56 million units in the first quarter of 2017 over the same period last year, according to a Sina news report. In 2016, Samsung Electronics was also laying off staff to scale down its business in China, the first move to do so in the past seven years. According to Sina, it trimmed 17.5 percent of total employees in the country in the last year.

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