Samsung, the maker of Galaxy smartphones and tablets, has widened its lead over Apple in the second quarter of this year, according to a non-scientific poll conducted by Reuters. It is estimated that Samsung sold 50 million smartphones in the June quarter while Apple is seeing selling 30.5 million iPhones.
Of course, the South Korean conglomerate recently launched the Galaxy S III smartphone, its flagship product backed with an aggressive advertising campaign, while Apple is left to fight with the nine-months-old iPhone 4S as the new iPhone won’t arrive until September or October…
The news gathering organization reports:
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd increased its lead over Apple Inc and Nokia Oyj in the global cellphone market in the second quarter, helped by strong demand and large marketing campaigns for its latest flagship model, the Galaxy S III.
This is according to a Reuters poll of 41 analysts. These things are not easy to put in perspective as Apple regularly reports on iPhones sold in quarterly reports while Samsung stopped reporting their smartphone and tablet sales last summer for competitive reasons.
IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo says Samsung remains the smartphone king:
We are also expecting to see the biggest smartphone volumes ever shipped from one single vendor in one quarter, driven by strong demand of the Galaxy portfolio, particularly the Galaxy S II and S III.
And Nokia’s fall from grace is even more evident now:
Samsung is estimated to have sold 15.7 million more phones than Nokia in the second quarter, the poll showed. In the first quarter, it sold 3.4 million more phones than Nokia, according to Gartner.
Samsung was so confident about meeting its internal sales target with the Galaxy S III that it said would ship more than ten million units in July.
In its biggest campaign to date, Samsung set aside a marketing budget that will double in the next few months alone what the company burned on all Galaxy-branded products in the United States in 2011.
Though no single smartphone has beaten Apple’s iPhone numbers yet, this has got to be the highest number of units sold for any individual phone model outside the iPhone.
If you ask me, those are some insane numbers by Samsung. Whichever way you look at it, fifty million smartphone units in just one quarter is an impressive figure. Even with a plethora of different smartphones covering a wide range of price points, this is still an impressive feat, don’t you think?