What you need to know
- Samsung sold, at most, half a million units of its first foldable in 2019.
- The number comes straight from the President and CEO of the company's IT & Mobile Communication division.
- They follow a previously erroneous claim by Samsung Electronics' President, Sohn Young-kwon, that the company had sold 1 million units in the three months since the phone's release.
The mystery surrounding the success of Samsung's first foldable phone is no more. After some back-and-forth last month, we now know that the Korean giant sold anywhere between 400,000 and 500,000 units in 2019.
The saga started when Samsung Electronics President Sohn Young-kwon claimed that the company had already sold a million Galaxy Folds by December, just three months after the company started selling the one-of-its-kind phone in September. The exec's statement was quickly corrected by Samsung reps, who stated that Sohn had simply mixed up sales targets with actual sales figures.
While that told us how many units Samsung hadn't sold, it didn't do much to tell us just how many it had. Thanks to the President of the company's IT and Mobile Communications Division, we now have a much better idea of just how successful the Galaxy Fold was. In a statement to Yonhap News Agency at CES 2020, Koh Dong-jin clarified that the chaebol had managed a more modest half a million sales, at best.
That's still quite an impressive figure, given the numerous reliability issues plaguing the handset's initial release. It's made even more impressive when one considers the nearly $2,000 asking price for the phone. While Samsung may have missed its initial sales estimates for the foldable smartphone by almost 50%, the company is set to make a strong comeback with a successor that sports a far more appealing design and is expected to cost only half as much as its predecessor. And if a leaked promotional video is to be believed, we may see it for ourselves as soon as next month.
