When the Galaxy S9 was announced earlier this year, Samsung said that it expected the new flagship to outperform the Galaxy S8. Reports to the contrary soon started trickling in. They claimed that the Galaxy S9 sales were slow. Customers in Samsung's home country of South Korea were said to be particularly uninterested as the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ reportedly hit record lows.
A recent report claimed that it's the first time in the history of the Galaxy S series that Q2 sales are lower than Q1. All market reports pointed to an acute underperformance by the flagship duo. Some have even claimed that it's Samsung's worst-selling Galaxy S flagship since the Galaxy S3 which came out in 2012.
Samsung had hinted at this much in its earnings guidance for Q2 2018. The company released its full earnings for the quarter today and confirmed that the Galaxy S9 sales have been below expectations.
Galaxy S9 sales
Samsung's earnings for the second quarter of this year are down 4 percent compared to a year earlier. The company blamed this on multiple factors including “slow sales of the Galaxy S9.” It mentions the stagnant high-end smartphone market as one of the reasons for the underperformance of this year's flagship.
Samsung doesn't reveal sales numbers for its smartphones in the earnings reports. It does mention that aside from the overall sluggish smartphone market, increased competition is also the cause of its smartphone shipments and revenues declining quarter-over-quarter. It mentions the slow sales of the flagship duo once again in addition to the phasing out of older low-end models for the decline in revenues.
The company's mobile division posted 24 trillion won or $21.4 billion in revenue for the quarter with an operating profit of 2.67 trillion won or $2.38 billion. It's a considerable decline from the 30.1 trillion won or $27 billion in revenue and the 7.59 trillion won or $6.8 billion in profit that the division posted during the same period last year. The Galaxy S8 was actually the world's best-selling Android smartphone in Q2 last year.
One of the reasons why customers haven't been that interested in the new flagship duo is that they're not significantly different from their predecessors. Many customers who purchased the Galaxy S8 saw little reason to upgrade and with competition in the high-end segment heating up, it's evident that the Galaxy S9 has been unable to generate the kind of response that Samsung was hoping for.
