Samsung reports nine million Galaxy S III pre-orders worldwide

Confirming its recent status of both the world’s #1 smartphone and cell phone vendor, Samsung reportedly racked up over nine million pre-orders for its Galaxy S III smartphone worldwide. The figure excludes the United States, where an LTE version of the phone is slated to arrive in June.

This compares to first-weekend sales of the iPhone 4S exceeding four million units, twice as many units as the iPhone 4 which sold 1.7 million units during launch weekend.

Samsung’s flagship handset got introduced on May 3, accompanied by a strong marketing push. It will first go on sale on May 29 in Germany with the 32GB model as a Vodafone exclusive for the first month. The device is already available on Amazon contract-free for $799

The figure came in a report by the Korea Economic Daily, sourced from an unidentified Samsung executive who reportedly shared this datum off the record with the paper. The story has since been corroborate by Reuters, which has it that a plant in South Korean is now churning out five million Galaxy S III units a month.

Samsung’s darling sports a 1.4GHz quad-core Samsung-built chip with 1GB RAM, a 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED display and an eight-megapixel back camera with a 1.9-megapixel camera out the front.

It also includes S-Voice, a new software feature akin to Siri which uses the voice recognition engine by Nuance, same like Apple’s digital assistant.

Looks like Samsung’s got a huge hit on its hands.

Its predecessor, the Galaxy S II, was introduced at Mobile World Congress in February 2011, and managed to sell 3 million global pre-orders by the end of April 2011. Nine months later, the S II sold 20 million units worldwide.

It should be noted that the S III is offered for pre-order through more than a hundred carriers around the globe.

For comparison, Apple’s phone is distributed by approximately 50 percent of all carriers worldwide. However, the iPhone 4S initially launched last October on just AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless, in addition to Apple’s retail stores, select Apple Authorized Resellers as well as Target, Best Buy and Walmart outlets.

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Apple still has to expand on its carrier relationships.

For example, only China Telecom and China Unicom carry the iPhone in the 1.33 billion people market, though Apple has long been rumored to be close to cutting a landmark iPhone partnership with China Mobile, a state-owned wireless operator ranked as the world’s biggest carrier that commands nearly 668 million subscribers.

Kudos to Samsung, nine million pre-orders in just two weeks is more than impressive number no matter how you look at it, no?