[UPDATE | 14th Dec, 5:15 PM] –
I know, the headline would have taken almost every one of you by surprise. The 1 million sales figure shook us as well. It seemed impossible and it is. Yeah, Samsung has clarified that it “hasn’t sold a million Galaxy Folds” in an official statement to Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.
Samsung Electronics president Young Sohn appears to have made a huge error on stage. He may have confused the company’s initial sales target for the year with actual sales, a Samsung spokesperson clarified. The company didn’t reveal the exact sales figure and is aiming to ship 500,000 Galaxy Fold units this year.
Original content follows…
Samsung’s first foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Fold may have stumbled out of the gate with a bunch of display issues prior to release, and multiple delayed launches, but the phone has still been selling like hotcakes since it was first made available to the public.
The company is claiming that it has sold 1 million units of the folding smartphone globally. The number was revealed by Samsung Electronics president Young Sohn at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in Berlin. He said that “there’s a million people that want to use this product at $2,000 each”, later clarifying that the company has actually sold that many Galaxy Fold devices.
That’s a fairly impressive number for the Galaxy Fold considering it was plagued by display reliability issues, and the fact that it’s priced at almost $2,000 (the phone launched at Rs. 1.65 lakh in India). Add to that the fact that it’s literally a phone that hasn’t ever existed before, and 1 million is a solid sales figure for the company even though it fades away when compared to the kind of sales numbers companies like Samsung report for their ‘regular’ smartphones even on a quarterly basis.
For those unaware, the Galaxy Fold went on sale in September this year, after seeing multiple delays in its launch due to issues with the displays on review units breaking within 24 hours of use. Multiple reviewers took to Twitter reporting the weird display issues developing on the Galaxy Fold units they received. Samsung had issued a recall and delayed the launch of the phone to get more time for testing the phone’s durability. The company made multiple changes to the Fold before launching it to the public a few months back; the hinge is now better sealed off, and the protective layer on the display, which a lot of people confused with a screen protector and removed, only to find out that doing so basically screws up the display completely, is now under the bezel so it can’t be removed intentionally or by accident.
