Samsung sales

Two 'Samsung sales' stories August 2013 - December 2013

Dramatic cut in Samsung’s smartphone forecasts, blaming high-end saturation

Korean site ET News reports that Samsung has cut its smartphone sales target for 2014 from 360M handsets to 330M. The company’s original goal would have represented 25 percent year-on-year growth, now reduced to just 14 percent.

The company is blaming saturation at the top end of the market, with many existing owners of flagship handsets having reduced their upgrade cycle from annual to bi-annual.

Samsung as a whole isn’t hurting – it recently announced record revenues and profits – but the bulk of those earnings came from lower-end handsets and its chip manufacturing business. The ET News piece says that Samsung also plans to move into a whole bunch of new areas, including cloud computing and hi-tech materials …
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Samsung beats Apple in acquiring first-time smartphone owners, while Apple wins in conversions

New figures from CIRP reported in Fortune show that both Samsung and Apple get the bulk of their smartphone sales from existing users of their respective platforms, but Samsung does better at attracting featurephone buyers while Apple does better at converting Samsung owners.

Samsung gets 43 percent of its customers from existing Android users (a mix of Samsung loyalists and customer acquisitions from HTC and Motorola), virtually identical to Apple’s figure of 42 percent for existing iPhone users.

Samsung’s low-end Android handsets helped it acquire 37 percent of its customers from featurephone owners, against 26 percent for Apple. The bad news for the company was that Apple wins three times as many smartphone customers from Samsung as Samsung does from Apple: 20 percent switched from a Samsung handset to an iPhone, while only 7 percent switched in the opposite direction.

Samsung’s Next Big Thing ad campaign, aimed specifically at younger users, also hasn’t been as successful as the company might have hoped, with Apple maintaining its younger age-profile.