Samsung reports it has sold 11M Galaxy S5 since launch
Outpacing the Galaxy S4 by 1 million units in its first month on sale, the company’s new flagship smartphone could boost dwindling profits.
Samsung is reporting robust sales for its Galaxy S5 during its debut month. The company's mobile head J.K. Shin said more than 11 million units of the flagship smartphone have sold since its April launch, according to The Wall Street Journal.
"It's been a month since we began selling the S5, and out of the gate, sales are much stronger than the Galaxy S4," Shin told the Journal.
Last year, Samsung reported 10 million Galaxy S4 sales in its first post-launch month. Shin said that the stronger sales for the Galaxy S5 were due to the company being better prepared with carrier agreements and offering the phone in 125 countries at the same time, according to the Journal. He said sales were especially good in developed countries, including the US, Australia, and Germany.
While the South Korean electronics giant is showing strong mobile sales, the company has experienced a rocky past few months. Not only did it report two consecutive quarters of profit decline, but it also lost 1 percent of its smartphone market share in the first quarter of this year. That was Samsung's first drop in smartphone market share since 2009.
For the first quarter of this year, Samsung reported a first-quarter operating profit of $8.2 billion, which was a 3.3 percent decline from the same period last year. And the company's mobile division, which typically accounts for two-thirds of the company's revenue, recorded a first-quarter operating profit of $6.2 billion, a slight decline from a year ago -- and the first decline in more than three years.
It's believed Samsung's lackluster earnings come from heightened competition from lower-cost smartphone makers like Huawei and Lenovo.
With its last earnings report Samsung said it expected revenue to improve in the second quarter due to strong sales of the Galaxy S5 . The flagship handset went on sale in early April and the company announced that it exceeded launch-day sales of the Galaxy S4 by roughly 30 percent. In some markets, Galaxy S5 sales on that first day were reported to be double that of the Galaxy S4.