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We’ve been wondering about the Samsung Galaxy… with most of its availability in regions with foreign tongues, English reporting on the device has been minimal. Luckily the guys at AndroidPub dropped me a tip to keep me updated – Korean website Hanooki.com reports (translated to English) that Samsung sold 100,000 Samsung Galaxies in its first month in Europe.
Although 100,000 doesn’t seem like a huge number of units, the article claims that the HTC Dream, HTC Magic and HTC Hero only sold a combined 80,000 units over that same time period in Europe. Really? These figures seem incredibly low to me. Knowing that Samsung is a South Korean company, theh Korean nationality is extremely proud and the reporting publication is Korean, I thought maybe the anlysis was bias or withholding an important detail. But by all accounts Hankooki looks like a legit website/entity.
This provokes several questions:
- How many TOTAL units of the Galaxy has Samsung sold?
- How many TOTAL units of the Dream/Magic/Hero has HTC sold?
- What is the continental/country breakdown of the above statistics?
- What were/are the expected unit sales volumes for each phone? Which models met and exceeded their goals?
I would absolutely LOVE to see the answers to the above questions – when the work week starts I’ll reach out to HTC and Samsung and see if we can get some kind of response.
Even with these numbers seeming rather low, the math adds up well for Android.
- 4 devices sell combined 180,000 units in Europe only
- That’s about 45k units/month for each device in EUROPE only
- Using that as a loose and unscientific average for future Android devices, and recognizing population and economic implications, suppose North America and Asia each achieve 45k units/month for each Android Phone on the market
- By the end of the year, it is estimated that there will be 15-20 Android devices on the market
- (20 devices) X (45k units/month) X (3 continents) =
- 2.7 Million
I realize this is incredibly unscientific. But the CONCEPT is sound – more Android devices on the market means more Android units sold. As devices age their volume will shrink and I also understand that Android models launched in the same continent will cannibalize sales, but we’re using a very basic formula with numbers that are probably totally unrealistic.
In fact, the numbers are probably much, much higher and if 2.7+ Million Android units are flying off the shelves each month by the end of the year, I’d say Android had a good 2009 and would be headed towards an epic 2010.
Hopefully we can get some information on the European Samsung/HTC Android figures to give this story a little more credibility/depth. Stay tuned.
Supposedly the HTC Magic sold 1 million units: http://phandroid.com/2009/08/12/1-million-htc-magics-have-been-sold/
That article was published only 7 days after the Magic (“myTouch”) was released in the US. It would be interesting to see what the breakdown is by region and month, and to see how many Dream units were sold.
@dsh – the 1 Million was over a greater period of time than 1 month, it was cumulative. And this report was basically saying over the most recent 30 days. At least that is what I got from the machine translation.
But yeah, I agree it seems lowballed and kinda fishy.
Seems kinda flaky, Rob. 2.7+ million a month? iPhone wouldn’t stand a chance :-P
I’ll probably returning my Galaxy tomorrow … only really used it for 3 days, and was really annoying. My biggest problem with it (or android, depending how you look at it) is the lack of media capabilities compared to my iphone. Sure it can display all kinds of photos and music, but even if you use something like doubletwist (for os x in this case) to copy things, it’s awful to use once on the device. Case in point, my ˜1000 iphone photos were finally transferred, but then if you want to look at them it has to create the thumbnails on the phone, and this takes _forever_ (after 20 min or so it was at 900 or so). Another thing is the music player, which is really annoying, and seems to have problems with id3 tags/album art sometimes. Sure I can hope that a market application will adress these concerns, but this is core functionality for me, I don’t want to have to use an external application for that. I didn’t even try videos, after the disappointing photo experience.
These are just the biggest concerns, leaving aside weird things like sluggish scrolling for no apparent reason all of a sudden, applications not available in a certain market place for no apparent reason, etc. etc.
/rant end Sorry, maybe not really the right place, but I felt like I had to …
I’ve got to agree with you about those sales numbers, they look very low.
Hopefully you can uncover the truth and get some more solid sales numbers.
From dsh’s comment above: HTC Magic sold 1 million units: http://phandroid.com/2009/08/12/1-million-htc-magics-have-been-sold/
most likely htc magic by itself has sold much more than 80k units in the last month. magic+hero+dream should have much higher results.
Given that they are advertising a 16 Million color display while in fact it only displays 65536 colors, this might become 100,000 returned or refunded devices!
It really is a shame how deceiving the Samsung advertising is, at least in Germany. Even more annoying is that they are not commenting anything officialy on this and *all* the other well documented issues. At the moment, the Galaxy is clearly the buggiest Android phone around!
I love Android and the phones that are due to be released and really hope it is successful but increasing the number of Android phones won’t increase the number of sales by that same magnitude (e.g. doubling the available Android phones won’t double the number of sales). There will be a natural saturation point where the consumers who want an Android phone will already have one and thus releasing new Android phones won’t necessarily capture new consumers from the other phone markets.
Regardless of the above, I do think more Android phones will increase the total number of sales and bring about so much more choice. I’ve currently got the HTC Hero which is an awesome phone by software (ugly by physical design). However, I can’t wait until phones like the Sony Ericsson Xperia X3 become available :-)
Bigger question, when will this come to the USA?
For a working stiff like me, if there are no android phones below US$200, I’m hard pressed to invest. At this stage of the game I can’t justify any phone and I mean ANY phone costing over US$200. I live in Hong Kong and there phones galore here which I often take advantage of, but not finding any androids below US$450 is quite ridiculous. If I own a 10.1 in. netbook and am addicted to gLife (google) AND the netbook cost less than US$300…..do you see where I’m going with this? I can live with a less expensive phone and take my netbook anywhere there is wifi and get a lot better experience using gLife. Well that’s my two cents anyway. I’m still a fan of HTC and any other brand running android, they just have consider lowering costs for my taste.
Exactly MishkaGreen. When will it come to the US? We haven’t heard news about this phone for a while. And if what step21 says is true it may have been a wait for nothing…..I really hope not. The Galaxy was my best hope for an Adnroid with some decent hardware.
I agree w/ MishkaGreen…
W/ respect to Dish21, the iPhone has had years to evolve, have Apps written, and further R&D development.
Android has had less than a year to evolve in the Public realm. Give it time and hold on to your phone…
You have a gem of a powerhouse. We here in the States are envious…
2ndly; Android will be Superior to the iPhone due to the very nature of having an Open Sourced OS, as opposed to the Proprietary OS-X. This takes into account the Dev’s and Hacks/MODs that will be FREELY available to all who write code.
Cheers
PU
That maths is completely flawed. It will not be anywhere near that many, as there aren’t that number of people who want an android phone who are just waiting for the right phone to come out before purchasing.
The market for Android phones is larger then what has currently been sold, but there is not a similar market for each phone as the one before. I’m no statistician, but the curve of total phones sold should flatten out until you hit 18 months, and then become a steady linear curve, right? Wolfram Alpha, Google and Wikipedia have proven fruitless in my search, so that’s just my 2 (euro) cents on the matter.
@Rob
Right, the different time durations and market regions makes the reported numbers pretty incomparable. (though 80K sounds small, unless most of the 1M were sold in the first month with a sharp dropoff) It would be very interesting if you can find some numbers that can be compared.