Samsung sells 300 million cell phones in 2011, 90 percent are dumb phones

Samsung has announced sales of three hundred million cell phones in November, a record for the South Korean conglomerate that had moved during the entire 2010 about 280 million handset units. The 300 million figure excludes December 2011 shipments, Reuters reported. Samsung Electronics began making cell phones back in 1988 and in 1996 announced total shipments of one million units. They sold a hundred millionth cell phone unit in 2005 and zoomed past the 200 million mark in 2009.

The 4G LTE market grew by 33 percent in the third quarter of 2011 and Samsung has a strong showing with the Galaxy SII device which debuted in April and sold over ten million units into the channel by the end of August 2011. Mind you, the 300 million figure includes all of the handsets Samsung shipped in 2011.

The lion’s share were dumb phones rather than smartphones, although we can’t tell for sure because Samsung stopped reporting smartphone unit sales this summer due to competition from Apple. Still, 300 million is 300 million, quite an impressive figure no matter how you look at it – that’s on average 825,000 units per day, each day of the year .

The Wave GTS8500, powered by Samsung’s own mobile operating system called Bada.