South Korean technology giant Samsung has lost its groove of late, and the latest news coming through from the Wall Street Journal isn’t going to help. According to that paper, Samsung’s flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S5, sold just 12 million units in its first three months after launch. That’s a whopping 4 million units less than its predecessor which was already derided for having not met the lofty heights of the Galaxy S3 before it.
Samsung has traditionally been very quick to trumpet the successes of its smartphones in fact in May this year it was already telling the world how it had sold more than 11 million Galaxy S5 smartphones in the first month of release meaning that the next two months turned out to be rather dry for Galaxy S5 sales yielding just 1 million more in the 125 countries in which the phone launched. China in particular was singled out with sales having dropped more than 50% in a market where the like of Xiaomi and Lenovo have come to dominate Samsung over the past year.
The drastic slowdown in sales meant that Samsung executives had overestimated the amount of stock required forcing a massive increase in advertising costs to attempt to move the phones that were “piling up in warehouses.” Under performing smartphone sales is something which Samsung plans to avoid with its upcoming 2015 smartphone portfolio which the company has already said will contain 25-30% fewer models than this year in an effort to utilise its massive manufacturing capabilities better.
It’s a tough time for Samsung, on top of the fact that its Android rivals are producing much better phones than they were a couple of years ago, high end smartphones are a hard sell when there’s so many decent ones around for much, much less.
