Samsung stops disclosing phone and tablet sales for competitive reasons

Samsung, which reported earnings today, also said it would stop reporting sales data and forecasts for its mobile phones and tablets, “probably due to its continuing legal battle with Apple”, analysts tell The Wall Street Journal. The company did not provide phone or tablet sales data in today’s earnings report, the decision Robert Yi, Samsung’s chief of investor relations, said in a conference call with analysts was due to competitive reasons:

As competition intensifies, there are increased risks that the information we provide may adversely affect our own businesses.

And in the earnings release Samsung only wrote that “shipments of mobile handsets increased in the high-single-digit range quarter-on-quarter”. Per latest IDC and ABI Research second-quarter cell phone survey, Samsung shipped…

…an IDC-estimated 19.2 million smartphones in the second. In the year-ago quarter they shipped just 3.1 million units, so they grew an astounding 500 percent on an annual basis. Apple reported shipments of 20.34 million iPhones in the second quarter, up from the 18.64 million iPhones shipped in the previous quarter and representing 142 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. In terms of market share, Apple captured an IDC-estimated 20.3 percent share of the smartphone market in the second quarter versus 19.2 percent for Samsung in the industry that shipped an 110 million smartphones in the June quarter.