14 DAY TRIAL // Samsung is usually touted as one of the biggest tablet vendors in the world, but recent evidence shows that the Korean tech giant might have knowingly lied about the amount of slates it has shipped.
New information emerging from the second Apple vs Samsung US patent lawsuit shows that the company might have misrepresented its Galaxy Tab sales, back when it first started offering its line of Galaxy Android tablets.
Back in January 2011, a report coming from Strategy Analytics cited a Samsung executive who claimed that the tech giant had managed to ship 2 million Galaxy Tabs in just six weeks’ time. The information was taken with a grain of salt by many and a lot of people wondered whether the numbers were accurate.
Now, Fortune reports, some secret Samsung internal documents dating from February 2012 reveal that the company’s tablet sales were actually very low. Far from shipping 2 million units in under two weeks, Sammy only managed to push about a million units in the US covering the whole 2011 period.
At the same time, Apple was leading the tablet market, while the Amazon Kindle Fire came in at number two. Surprisingly, even Nook tablets sold better on American territory than the Galaxy Tab.
Samsung usually makes forecasts of how much the competition has managed to sell, so in 2011 the Korean tech giant claimed Apple shipped 17.4 million iPads in the US (with 32 million units being sold globally), while the Kindle Fire and Nook sold 5 million and 1.5 million units, respectively.
Samsung’s claims that it sold 2 million units of its first-gen tablet in just a few weeks didn’t seem to hold up back then and now we finally have the confirmation that the scenario wasn’t a confabulation. But, throughout 2011, the company launched its 10-inch Galaxy Tab, a slate that finally gained some traction with consumers.
Samsung has been known to be making big claims before. For example, the tech company said it had sold 800,000 units of the original Galaxy Gear smartwatch, even if reports coming in were suggesting that the wearable was one major flop, selling only 50, 000 units.
So, the bottom line is that Samsung was trying to build an image for itself, even at those early stages of penetrating the market.
Today, the company has been shown as being the world’s second largest tablet vendor, but can we trust these numbers?
We believe that, at this point, we can, since Samsung has spawned the market with multiple offerings ranging from high-end to mid-range, targeting every consumer niche out there and finally managing to carve a place for itself in the tablet ecosystem.