14 DAY TRIAL // This year, Samsung practically re-invented its Galaxy S flagship line. Listening to customers’ complaints from the past, the Korean tech giant unveiled a sleek smartphone made of glass and metal, and not of plastic like in the past few years.
Still, a few tradeoffs were made, like not including a microSD card slot or a removable battery, which put a lot of Samsung enthusiasts off. When the company launched the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge flagships, it seemed that the devices were pretty well received. But the bigger picture isn’t that pretty.
A report coming out of Business Korea claims that the South Korean behemoth has been seeing a pronounced decline when it comes to its Galaxy smartphone series for five months straight. This developing tendency also had a nasty effect on stock price.
Citing information from Bloomberg, the publication reveals that the smartphone giant saw its stock price drop by 8.1% in August in what turns out to be the longest period of consecutive months of decline since 1983. On top of that, market capitalization dropped about $12 / €11 billion in August.
Samsung's grip on the smartphone market is slipping
This is blamed on the rising Chinese competition and its eternal Arch enemy Apple, who has been hard at work undermining Samsung’s supremacy on the smartphone market.
Samsung even changed its launch pattern with the new Galaxy Note5 and unveiled it before schedule, just to get ahead of Apple and its new iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. However, this tactic failed to ignite hopes for a better outcome in the second half of the year.
The Korean tech giant has fallen from grace in China, where it is no longer the market leader, dropping more than four positions and getting behind Apple, Xiaomi and Huawei.
On top of its flagship products, Samsung continues to unveil lots of low-range and middle-range models. For example, the device maker is prepping a new Galaxy O smartphone family, but as we have seen a few days ago, the first two smartphones actually seem pretty unimpressive.
With its premium models not doing so well in terms of sales and the countless, boring models it offers in the mid-range department, Samsung seems to be traversing a rot. The question is: can it hope to escape it?